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THE   INNER    LIFE 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK    •    BOSTON   •    CHICAGO    •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA   •    SAN    FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •  BOMBAY  •  CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE  INNER  LIFE 


BY 

RUFUS   M.  JONES,  A.M.,  Litt.D. 

PROFESSOR   OF  PHILOSOPHY   IN   HAVERFORD   COLLEGE 

AUTHOR   OF   "  STUDIES   IN   MYSTICAL   RELIGION  " 
"  SPIRITUAL  REFORMERS,"  ETC. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1916 

All  rights  reserved 


4 


Copyright,  1916, 
By  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 

Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  October,  1916. 


NorhjootJ  ifrfss 

J.  S.  Gushing  Co.  — Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


INTRODUCTION 

There  is  no  inner  life  that  is  not  also 
an  outer  life.  To  withdraw  from  the 
stress  and  strain  of  practical  action  and 
from  the  complication  of  problems  into 
the  quiet  call  of  the  inner  life  in  order  to 
build  its  domain  undisturbed  is  the  sure 
way  to  lose  the  inner  life.  The  finest  of 
all  the  mystical  writers  of  the  fourteenth 
century  —  the  author  of  Theologia  Ger- 
manica  —  knew  this  as  fully  as  we  of  this 
psychologically  trained  generation  know 
it.  He  intensely  desired  a  rich  inner  life, 
but  he  saw  that  to  be  beautiful  within  he 
must  live  a  radiant  and  effective  life  in 
the  world  of  men  and  events.  "I  would 
fain  be,"  he  says,  "to  the  eternal  God 
what  a  man's  hand  is  to  a  man"  —  i.e.  he 
seeks,  with  all  the  eagerness  of  his  glow- 


vi  INTRODUCTION 

ing  nature,  to  be  an  efficient  instrument 
of  God  in  the  world.  In  the  practice  of 
the  presence  of  God,  the  presence  itself 
becomes  more  sure  and  indubitable.  Re- 
ligion does  not  consist  of  inward  thrills 
and  private  enjoyment  of  God ;  it  does 
not  terminate  in  beatific  vision.  It  is 
rather  the  joyous  business  of  carrying  the 
Life  of  God  into  the  lives  of  men  —  of 
being  to  the  eternal  God  what  a  man's 
hand  is  to  a  man. 

There  is  no  one  exclusive  "way"  either 
to  the  supreme  realities  or  to  the  loftiest 
experiences  of  life.  The  "way"  which  we 
individuals  select  and  proclaim  as  the 
only  highway  of  the  soul  back  to  its  true 
home  turns  out  to  be  a  revelation  of  our 
own  private  selves  fully  as  much  as  it  is  a 
revelation  of  a  via  sacra  to  the  one  goal  of 
all  human  striving.  Life  is  a  very  rich 
and  complex  affair  and  it  forever  floods 
over  and  inundates  any  feature  which  we 
pick  out  as  essential  or  as  pivotal  to  its 
consummation.  God  so  completely  over- 
arches all  that  is  and  He  is  so  genuinely 


INTRODUCTION  vii 

the  fulfillment  of  all  which  appears  in- 
complete and  potential  that  we  cannot 
conceivably  insist  that  there  shall  be  only 
one  way  of  approach  from  the  multiplic- 
ity of  the  life  which  we  know  to  the 
infinite  Being  whom  we  seek. 

Most  persons  are  strangely  prone  to  use 
the  ^^  principle  of  parsimony."  They 
appear  to  have  a  kind  of  fascination 
for  the  dilemma  of  either-or  alternatives. 
*' Faith"  or  "works"  is  one  of  these 
great  historic  alternatives.  But  this 
cleavage  is  too  artificial  for  full-rounded 
reality.  Each  of  these  "halves"  cries 
for  its  other,  and  there  cannot  be  any 
great  salvation  until  we  rise  from  the 
poverty  of  either  half  to  the  richness 
of  the  united  whole  which  includes  both 
"ways." 

So,  too,  we  have  had  the  alternative 
of  "outer"  or  "inner"  way  forced  upon 
us.  We  are  told  that  the  only  eflficacious 
way  is  the  way  of  the  cross,  treated  as 
an  outer  historical  transaction ;  and  we 
have,   again,   been   told   that   there  is   no 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

way  except  the  inner  way  of  direct  ex- 
perience and  inner  revelation.  There  are 
those  who  say,  with  one  of  George  Chap- 
man's characters  : 

"I'll  build  all  inward  —  not  a  light  shall  ope 
The  common  out-way. 

I'll  therefore  live  in  dark ;   and  all  my  light 
Like  ancient  temples,  let  in  at  my  top."' 

Over  against  the  mystic  who  glories  in 
the  infinite  depths  of  his  own  soul,  the 
evangelical,  with  excessive  humility,  allows 
not  even  a  spark  of  native  grandeur  to 
the  soul  and  denies  that  the  inner  way 
leads  to  anything  but  will-o'-the-wisps. 
This  is  a  very  inept  and  unnecessary 
halving  of  what  should  be  a  whole.  It 
spoils  religious  life,  somewhat  as  the 
execution  of  Solomon's  proposal  would 
have  spoiled  for  both  mothers  the  living 
child  that  was  to  be  divided.  Twenty- 
five  hundred  years  ago  Heraclitus  of 
Ephesus  declared  that  there  is  "a  way 
up  and  a  way  down  and  both  are  one." 
So,   too,    there   is   an   outer   way   and    an 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

inner  way  and  both  are  one.  It  takes 
both  diverse  aspects  to  express  the  rich 
and  complete  reality,  which  we  mar  and 
mangle  when  we  dichotomize  it  and 
glorify  our  amputated  half.  There  is  a 
fine  saying  of  a  medieval  mystic:  "He 
who  can  see  the  inward  in  the  outward 
is  more  spiritual  than  he  who  can  only 
see  the  inward  in  the  inward." 

This  little  book  on  the  "Inner  Life" 
does  not  assume  to  deal  with  the  whole  of 
the  religious  life.  It  recognizes  that  the 
outer  in  the  long  run  is  just  as  essential 
as  the  inner.  This  one  inner  aspect  is 
selected  for  emphasis,  without  any  inten- 
tion of  slighting  the  importance  of  the 
other  side  of  the  shining  shield.  Men 
to-day  are  so  overwhelmingly  occupied 
with  objective  tasks ;  they  are  so  busy 
with  the  field  of  outer  action,  that  it  is 
a  peculiarly  opportune  time  to  speak  of 
the  interior  world  where  the  issues  of 
life  are  settled  and  the  tissues  of  destiny 
are  woven.  There  will  certainly  be  some 
readers   who   will   be   glad   to   turn   from 


X  INTRODUCTION 

accounts  of  trenches  lost  or  won  to  spend 
a  little  time  with  the  less  noisy  but  no 
less  mysterious  battle  line  inside  the  soul, 
and  from  problems  of  foreign  diplomacy 
to  the  drama  of  the  inner  life. 


CONTENTS 


Introduction 


Chapter  I.     The  Inner  Way 

Sec.  I.   The  Momentous  Choice  . 
Sec.  2.    Making  a  Life  . 
Sec.  3.    The  Spirit  of  the  Beatitudes 
Sec.  4.    The  Way  of  Contagion    . 
Sec.  5.   The  Second  Mile     . 

Chapter  II.    The  Kingdom  within  the  Soul 
Sec.  I .    Bags  that  Wax  not  Old   . 
Sec.  2.    Otherism  ..... 

Sec.  3.    Scavengers  and  the  Kingdom  . 
Sec.  4.    "  The  Beyond  is  Within  " 
Sec.  5.   The  Attitude  toward  the  Unseen 

Chapter  III.    Some  Prophets  of  the  Inner 
Way  . 
Sec.  I.    The  Psalmisfs  Way 
Sec.  2.    The  New  and  Living  Way 
Sec.  3.    An  Apostle  of  the  Inner  Way 
Sec.  4.    The  Ephesian  Gospel 


FAGK 

V 

I 
I 

9 
14 
23 
30 

39 
39 
46 

50 
56 
61 

70 
70 

77 
82 
90 


xii                         CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter  IV.    The  Way  of  Experience 

97 

Sec.  I .   Waiting  on  God 

97 

Sec.  2.    In  the  Spirit     .... 

105 

Sec.  3.    The  Power  of  Prayer 

III 

Sec.  4.   The  Mystery  of  Goodness 

116 

Sec.  5.    "As  One  having  Authority"    . 

123 

Sec.  6.    Seeing  Him  Who  is  Invisible  . 

133 

Chapter  V.    A      Fundamental      Spiritual 

Outlook     . 

138 

Chapter  VI.    What  does  Religious  Experi- 

ENCE     Tell     Us     about 
God 164 


THE    INNER   LIFE 


THE  INNER  LIFE 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  INNER  WAY 

I 

THE    MOMENTOUS    CHOICE 

Every  scrap  of  writing  that  sheds  any 
light  on  the  life  of  Jesus,  and  every  in- 
cident that  gives  the  least  detail  about 
His  movements  or  His  teaching  are  precious 
to  us.  One  can  hardly  conceive  the  joy 
and  enthusiasm  that  would  burst  forth  in 
all  lands,  if  new  fragments  of  papyrus  or 
of  parchment  could  be  unearthed  that 
would  add  in  any  measure  to  our  knowl- 
edge of  the  way  this  Galilean  life  was 
lived  "beneath  the  Syrian  blue."  But  it 
may  now  probably  be  taken  for  granted 
that  the  material  will  never  be  forth- 
coming —  and  it  surely  is  not  now  in 
hand  —  for    an    adequate    biography    of 


2  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

Him.  The  lives  of  Jesus  that  have  been 
written  in  modern  times  have  a  certain 
value,  as  suggestive  revelations  of  what 
the  writers  thought  He  ought  to  have 
been  or  ought  to  have  done,  but  biogra- 
phies, in  the  true  sense  of  the  word,  they 
are  not.  The  Evangelists  performed  for 
us  an  inestimable  service,  but  they  did 
not  furnish  us  the  sort  of  data  necessary 
for  a  detailed  biography,  expressed  in 
clock-time  language. 

Our  "sources"  are  much  more  adequate 
when  we  turn  our  attention  from  external 
events  to  the  inner  way  which  His  life 
reveals,  though  they  still  allow  for  free 
play  of  imagination  and  for  much  fluidity 
of  subjective  interpretation.  It  is  possible, 
however,  I  believe,  to  look  through  the 
genuine  words  that  are  preserved  and  to 
see,  with  clairvoyant  insight,  the  inner 
kingdom  of  the  soul  in  that  Person  whose 
interior  life  was  the  richest  of  all  those 
who  have  walked  our  earth.  There  are 
curious  little  playthings  to  be  bought  in 
Rome.     If  one  looks   through   a  pin-hole 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  3 

peep  somewhere  in  one  of  these  tiny 
toys,  one  sees  to  his  surprise  the  whole 
mighty  structure  of  St.  Peter's  Cathedral, 
standing  out  as  large  as  it  looks  in  re- 
ality. Perhaps  we  can  find  some  pin- 
hole peeps  in  the  gospels  that  in  a  similar 
way  will  let  us  see  the  marvelous  inner 
world,  the  extraordinary  spiritual  life,  of 
this  Person  whose  outer  biography  so 
baffles  us. 

Our  first  single  glimpse  of  His  interior 
life  must  be  got  without  the  help  of  any 
actual  word  of  His.  It  is  given  to  us  in 
the  gospel  accounts  of  His  discovery  of 
His  mission.  How  long  the  consciousness 
of  mission  had  been  gestating  we  cannot 
tell.  What  books  He  read,  if  any,  are 
never  named.  What  ripening  influence 
the  days  of  toil  in  the  carpenter  shop  may 
have  had,  is  unnoted.  What  dawned 
upon  Him  as  He  meditated  in  silence  is 
not  reported.  What  formative  ideas  may 
have  come  from  the  little  groups  of  "the 
quiet  ones  in  the  land"  can  only  be 
guessed  at.     We  are  merely  told  that  He 


4  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

increased  in  wisdom  as  He  advanced  in 
stature,  which  is  the  only  conceivable 
way  that  personality  can  be  attained. 
Suddenly  the  moment  of  clear  insight 
came  and  He  saw  what  He  was  in  the 
world  for. 

It  was  usual  for  the  great  prophets  of 
His  people  to  discover  their  mission  in 
some  such  moment  of  clarified  inward 
sight.  Isaiah  saw  the  Lord  with  His 
train  filling  the  temple,  felt  his  lips  cleansed, 
and  heard  the  call  "who  will  go?"  Eze- 
kiel  saw  the  indescribable  living  creature 
with  the  hands  of  a  man  under  the  wings 
of  the  Spirit  and  heard  himself  called  to 
his  feet  for  his  commission.  So  here, 
there  was  a  sudden  invading  consciousness 
from  beyond.  The  world  with  its  solid 
hills  appears  only  the  fragment,  which  it 
is,  and  the  World  of  wider  Reality  floods 
in  and  reveals  itself.  The  sky  seems  rent 
apart,  the  Spirit,  as  though  once  more 
brooding  over  a  world  in  the  making, 
covers  Him  from  above,  and  gives  inward 
birth  to  a  conviction  of  uniqueness  of  Life 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  5 

and  uniqueness  of  mission.     He  feels  Him- 
self in  union  with  His  Father.^ 

This  experience  of  the  invading  Life, 
awakening  a  consciousness  of  unique  per- 
sonal mission,  brought  with  it,  as  an  un- 
avoidable sequence,  the  stress  and  strain 
of  a  very  real  temptation.  The  inner 
world  of  self-consciousness  has  strange 
watershed  "divides"  that  shape  the  cur- 
rents of  the  life  as  the  mountain  ridges  of 
the  outer  world  do  the  rivers.  No  new 
nativity,  no  fresh  awakening,  can  come  to 
a  soul  without  forcing  the  momentous 
issue  of  its  further  meaning,  or  without 
raising  the  urgent  question,  how  shall  the 
new  insight,  the  fresh  light,  the  increased 
power  be  wrought  into  life  .?  The  deepest 
issues  turn,  not  upon  the  choice  of  "things," 
but  upon  the  choice  of  the  kind  of  self  that 
is  to  be,  and  the  most  decisive  dramas  are 
those  that  are  enacted  in  the  inner  world 
before  the  footlights  of  our  private  theater. 
The  temptation  is  described  by  the  Evan- 
gelists in  such  conventional  language  and 

1  Mark  I.  lo-ii. 


6  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

in  such  popular  and  pictorial  imagery  that 
its  immense  inner  reality  is  often  missed  by 
the  reader.  This  oriental,  pictorial  way 
of  presenting  the  drama  of  the  soul  catches 
the  western  mind  in  the  toils  of  literalism. 
The  picture  is  taken  for  the  reality.  What 
we  have  here  in  the  temptation,  when  we 
go  into  the  heart  of  the  matter,  is  the 
momentous  choice  of  the  kind  of  Person 
that  is  to  emerge.  It  is  the  immemorial 
battle  between  the  higher  and  the  lower 
self  within.  It  was  the  line  of  least  resist- 
ance to  accept  popular  expectation,  to  go 
forth  to  realize  the  dream  of  the  age.  A 
person  conscious  of  divine  anointing,  fired 
with  passionate  loyalty  to  the  nation's 
hopes,  gifted  with  extraordinary  power  of 
moving  men  to  new  issues  would  feel  at 
once  that  he  had  only  to  put  himself  forth 
as  the  expected  Messiah  in  order  to  carry 
the  enthusiastic  people  with  him.  Let 
him  but  come  with  the  spectacular  powers 
of  the  Messiah  that  was  eagerly  looked  for, 
the  power  to  turn  stones  to  bread,  to  leap 
from  the  pinnacle  of  the  temple  without 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  7 

injury,  to  break  the  Roman  yoke  and 
make  Jerusalem  once  again  the  city  of 
God's  chosen  people  —  and  success  was 
sure  to  follow.  God's  ancient  covenant 
was  an  absolute  pledge  to  the  faithful 
that  He  would  in  His  own  time  make 
bare  His  arm  and  deliver  His  people. 
As  soon  as  the  anointed  one  appeared 
all  the  forces  of  the  unseen  world  would 
be  at  his  command  and  his  triumph  would 
be  assured. 

The  appeal  of  a  career  like  that  is  no 
fictitious  "temptation."  It  is  of  a  piece 
with  what  besets  us  all.  It  is  out  of  the 
very  stuff  of  nature.  At  some  such  cross- 
road we  have  all  stood  —  with  the  issue 
of  our  inner  destiny  in  unstable  equi- 
librium. 

Over  against  it,  another  "way"  is  set, 
another  kind  of  life  is  dimly  outlined, 
another  type  of  anointed  one  is  seen  to 
be  possible,  another  kingdom,  totally  dif- 
ferent from  the  one  of  popular  expecta- 
tion, is  descried.  This  kingdom  of  His 
spiritual  vision   cannot  come  by   miracle 


8  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

or  by  power;  it  can  come  only  through 
complete  adjustment  of  will  to  the  will 
of  the  Father-God.  This  anointed  one  of 
His  higher  aspiration  will  be  no  temporal 
ruler,  no  political  king,  no  spectacular 
wonder-worker.  He  will  rule  only  by  the 
conquering  power  of  love  and  goodness. 
He  will  venture  everything  on  sheer  faith 
in  the  Father's  love  and  on  the  appeal 
of  uncalculating  goodness  of  heart  and 
will.  This  new  kind  of  life  that  draws 
Him  from  the  line  of  least  resistance  is  a 
life  of  utter  simplicity,  which  discounts 
what  the  world  calls  "goods,"  which 
draws  upon  an  unseen  environment  for 
its  resources  and  which  expands  inwardly, 
rather  than  outwardly,  after  the  manner 
of  the  green  bay  tree.  The  new  "way" 
that  opens  to  His  sight,  and  that  beckons 
Him  from  all  other  ways  of  glory,  is  a 
way  of  suffering  and  sacrifice,  a  way  of 
the  cross.  It  offers  itself  not  because 
self-giving  is  a  better  way  than  an  easy, 
happy  path,  but  because  it  is  the  only 
way  by  which  love  in  a  world  like  ours 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  9 

can  reach  its  goal ;  it  is  the  only  way  by 
which  the  kingdom  of  God  can  be  formed 
in  the  lives  of  men  like  us. 

He  came  forth  from  those  momentous 
days  of  inner  struggle  with  the  issue 
settled,  and  with  the  first  step  taken  in 
the  way  of  the  Kingdom. 

II 

MAKING    A    LIFE 

Our  present-day  age  has  a  kind  of 
passion  for  the  study  of  developing  pro- 
cesses. We  do  not  feel  quite  at  home 
with  any  subject  until  we  can  work  our 
way  back  to  its  origin  or  origins  and  then 
follow  it  in  its  unfoldings,  explaining  the 
higher  and  more  complex  stages  in  terms 
of  the  lower  and  more  simple  ones. 

That  method,  however,  cannot  be  suc- 
cessfully used  to  unlock  the  secret  of  the 
gospels.  We  do  not  find  beginnings  here ; 
we  cannot  follow  genetic  processes ;  we 
are  unable  to  discriminate  higher  and 
lower  stages  of  insight.  We  must  launch 
out  at  the  very  start  in  mid-sea.     What- 


lO  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

ever  words  of  Christ  one  begins  with 
indicate  that  He  has  already  arrived  at 
an  absolute  insight  —  I  mean,  that  He 
has  found  a  way  of  living  that  is  no  longer 
relatively  good,  but  intrinsically  and  ab- 
solutely good. 

It  is  an  inveterate  habit  with  men  like 
us  to  estimate  everything  in  terms  of 
relative  results.  We  are  pragmatists  by 
the  very  push  of  our  immemorial  instincts. 
Our  first  question,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously, is  apt  to  be,  what  effects  will 
come,  if  I  act  so,  or  so  ?  Will  this  course 
work  well  ?  Will  it  further  some  issue  or 
some  interest  ?  And  this  deep-lying  prag- 
matic tendency  —  this  aim  at  results  — 
appears  woven  into  the  very  fiber  even 
of  much  of  the  religion  of  the  world. 

Sometimes  the  results  sought  are  near, 
sometimes  they  are  remote ;  sometimes 
they  are  sought  for  this  world,  sometimes 
they  are  sought  for  the  next  world ;  some- 
times the  pragmatic  aim  at  results  is 
crudely  and  coarsely  selfish,  sometimes  it 
is  refined,  or  altogether  veiled,  but  religion 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  n 

has  no  doubt  often  enough  been  an  im- 
pressive kind  of  double-entry  bookkeep- 
ing, the  piling  up  of  credits  or  of  merits 
which  some  day  will  bring  the  sure  result 
that  is  sought. 

Just  that  entire  pragmatic  attitude 
Christ  has  left  forever  behind.  His  inner 
way,  His  interior  insight,  passes  on  to  a 
new  level  of  life,  to  a  totally  different 
type  of  religious  aspiration  and  to  another 
method  of  valuation.  For  Him  the  be- 
lyond  is  always  within.  The  only  good 
thing  is  a  life  that  is  intrinsically  good ; 
the  only  blessedness  worth  talking  about 
is  a  kind  of  blessedness  which  attaches 
by  a  law  of  inner  necessity  to  the  char- 
acter of  the  life  itself.  It  makes  no 
difference  what  world  one  may  eventually 
be  in  —  if  only  it  is  still  a  world  of  spirit- 
ual issues  —  goodness,  holiness,  likeness 
to  God,  will  still  constitute  blessedness  as 
they  do  in  this  world. 

When  once  this  insight  is  reached,  it 
affects  all  the  pursuits  and  all  the  valua- 
tions of  the  soul.     All  "other  things"  at 


12  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

once  become  secondary,  and  "entering  into 
life,"  '^seeking  life,"  '^finding  life,"  be- 
comes the  primary  thing.  *' Making  a 
life"  overtops  in  importance  even  "mak- 
ing a  living"  —  the  life  is  more  than 
meat,  more  than  raiment,  more  than 
gaining  the  whole  world.  It  is  better  to 
enter  into  life  halt  and  maimed  —  with 
right  hand  cut  oflf  and  eye  plucked  out 
—  than  bend  all  one's  energies  to  preserve 
the  body  whole  and  yet  to  miss  life.  The 
way  to  life  is  strait,  the  entering  gate  is 
narrow.  One  cannot  enter  without  facing 
the  stern  necessity  of  focusing  the  vision 
on  the  central  purpose,  without  getting 
"a  single  eye,"  without  letting  go  many 
things  for  the  sake  of  one  thing. 

Sacrifice,  surrender,  negation,  are  in- 
herently involved  in  any  great  onward- 
marching  life.  They  go  with  any  choice 
that  can  be  made  of  a  rich  and  intense  life. 
It  is  impossible  to  find  without  losing, 
to  get  without  giving,  to  live  without 
dying.  But  sacrifice,  surrender,  negation, 
are   never  for  their  own   sake ;    they  are 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  13 

never  ends   in  themselves.     They  are  in- 
volved in  life  itself. 

One  great  spiritual  law  comes  to  light 
and  becomes  operative,  as  soon  as  the 
interior  insight  is  won,  as  soon  as  the 
inner  way  is  found :  The  law  that  the 
soul  can  have  what  it  wants.  This  law  of 
the  interior  life,  of  the  inner  way,  Christ 
affirms  again  and  again  in  varying  phrase. 
The  inner  attitude,  the  settled  trend  of 
desire,  the  persistent  swing  of  the  will,  are 
the  very  things  that  make  life.  The 
person  who  cherishes  hate  in  his  soul 
forms  a  disposition  of  hatred  and  must 
live  in  the  atmosphere  which  that  spirit 
forms.  The  person  who  longs  for  deeds 
that  are  wrong,  and  allows  desire  to  play 
with  free  scope  is  inwardly  as  though  he 
did  the  deed.  He  is  what  he  wants  to  be. 
And  so,  too,  on  the  other  hand,  the  rightly 
fashioned  will  is  its  own  reward  and  has 
its  own  peculiar  blessedness.  The  person 
who  hungers  and  thirsts  for  goodness  will 
get  what  he  wants.  He  who  seeks,  with 
undivided    aspiration,    will    always    find. 


14  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

He  who  knocks  with  persistent  desire  for 
the  gates  of  life  to  open  will  see  them  swing 
apart  for  him  to  go  through  to  his  goal. 
He  who  asks,  with  the  ground  swell  of 
his  whole  inner  being,  for  the  things 
which  minister  to  life  and  feed  its  deepest 
roots,  will  get  what  he  asks  for.  The 
very  pity  of  the  Pharisee's  way  of  life 
is  that  he  has  his  reward  —  he  gets  what 
he  is  seeking.  The  glory  of  the  other 
way  is  the  glory  of  the  imperfect  —  the 
glory  of  living  toward  the  flying  goal  of 
likeness  to  the  Father  in  heaven. 

Ill 

THE    SPIRIT    OF    THE    BEATITUDES 

In  putting  the  emphasis  for  the  moment 
on  the  inner  way  of  religion,  we  must  be 
very  careful  not  to  encourage  the  heresy 
of  treating  religion  as  a  withdrawal  from 
the  world,  or  as  a  retreat  from  the  press 
and  strain  of  the  practical  issues  and 
problems  of  the  social  order.  That  is  the 
road  to  spiritual  disaster,  not  to  spiritual 
power.     Christ    gives    no    encouragement 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  15 

to  the  view  that  the  spiritual  ideal  — 
the  Kingdom  of  God  —  can  ever  be 
achieved  apart  from  the  conquest  of  the 
whole  of  life  or  without  the  victory  that 
overcomes  the  world.  Religion  can  no 
more  be  cut  apart  from  the  intellectual 
currents,  or  from  the  moral  undertakings, 
or  from  the  social  tasks  of  an  age,  than  any 
other  form  of  life  can  be  isolated  from  its 
native  environment.  To  desert  this  world, 
which  presses  close  around  us,  for  the  sake 
of  some  remote  world  of  our  dreams,  is  to 
neglect  our  one  chance  to  get  a  real  re- 
ligion. 

But  at  the  same  time  the  only  possible 
way  to  realize  a  kingdom  of  God  in  this 
world,  or  in  any  other  world,  is  to  begin 
by  getting  an  inner  spirit,  the  spirit  of 
the  Kingdom,  formed  within  the  lives  of 
the  few  or  many  who  are  to  be  the  "seed" 
of  it.  The  "Beatitudes"  furnish  one  of 
these  extraordinary  pin-hole  peeps,  of  which 
I  spoke  in  a  former  section,  through  which 
this  whole  inner  world  can  be  seen.  Here, 
in   a   few   lines,   loaded   with   insight,   the' 


l6  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

seed-spirit  of  the  Kingdom  comes  full  into 
sight.  We  are  given  no  new  code,  no 
new  set  of  rules,  no  legal  system  at  all. 
It  is  the  proclamation  of  a  new  spirit, 
a  new  way  of  living,  a  new  type  of  per- 
son. To  have  a  world  of  persons  of  this 
type,  to  have  this  spirit  prevail,  would 
mean  the  actual  presence  of  the  Kingdom 
of  God,  because  this  spirit  would  produce 
not  only  a  new  inner  world,  but  a  new 
outer  world  as  well. 

The  first  thing  to  note  about  the  blessed- 
ness proclaimed  in  the  beatitudes  is  that 
it  is  not  a  prize  held  out  or  promised  as  a 
final  reward  for  a  certain  kind  of  con- 
duct ;  it  attaches  by  the  inherent  nature 
of  things  to  a  type  of  life,  as  light  attaches 
to  a  luminous  body,  as  motion  attaches 
to  a  spinning  top,  as  gravitation  attaches 
to  every  particle  of  matter.  To  be  this 
type  of  person  is  to  be  living  the  happy, 
blessed  life,  whatever  the  outward  con- 
ditions may  be.  And  the  next  thing  to 
note  is  that  this  type  of  life  carries  in 
itself  a  principle  of  advance.     One  reason 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  17 

why  it  Is  a  blessed  type  of  life  is  that  it 
cannot  be  arrested,  it  cannot  be  static. 
The  beatitude  lies  not  in  attainment, 
not  in  the  arrival  at  a  goal,  but  in  the' 
way^  in  the  spirit,  in  the  search,  in  the 
march. 

I  suspect  that  the  nature  of  "the  happy 
life"  of  the  beatitudes  can  be  adequately 
grasped  only  when  it  is  seen  in  contrast 
to  that  of  the  Pharisee  who  is  obviously 
in  the  background  as  a  foil  to  bring  out 
the  portrait  of  the  new  type.  The  pity 
of  the  Pharisee's  aim  was  that  it  could 
be  reached  —  he  gets  his  reward.  He  has 
a  definite  limit  in  view  —  the  keeping  of  a 
fixed  law.  Beyond  this  there  are  no 
worlds  to  conquer.  Once  the  near  finite 
goal  is  touched  there  is  nothing  to  pursue. 
The  immediate  effect  of  this  achievement 
is  conceit  and  self-satisfaction.  The  trail 
of  calculation  and  barter  lies  over  all  his 
righteousness.  There  is  in  his  mind  an 
equation  between  goodness  and  prosperity, 
between  righteousness  and  success:  "If 
thou  hast  made  the  most  High  thy  habita- 


1 8  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

tion  there  shall  no  evil  befall  thee ;  neither 
shall  any  plague  come  nigh  thy  dwelling." 
The  person  who  has  loss  or  trouble  or 
suffering  must  have  been  an  overt  or  a 
secret  sinner,  as  the  question  about  the 
blind  man  indicates. 

The  goodness  portrayed  in  the  "beati- 
tudes" is  different  from  this  by  the  width 
of  the  sky.  Christ  does  not  call  the 
righteous  person  the  happy  man.  He 
does  not  pronounce  the  attainment  of 
righteousness  blessed,  because  a  "right- 
eousness" that  gets  attained  is  always 
external  and  conventional ;  it  is  a  kind 
that  has  definable,  quantitative  limits  — 
"how  many  times  must  I  forgive  my 
brother.^"  "Who  is  my  neighbor.^" 
The  beatitude  attaches  rather  to  hunger 
and  thirst  for  goodness.  The  aspiration, 
and  not  the  attainment,  is  singled  out  for 
blessing.  In  the  popular  estimate,  happi- 
ness consists  in  getting  desires  satisfied. 
For  Christ  the  real  concern  is  to  get  new 
and  greater  desires  —  desires  for  infinite 
things.     The    reach   must   always    exceed 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  19 

the  grasp.  The  heart  must  forever  be 
throbbing  for  an  attainment  that  lies 
beyond  any  present  consummation.  It  is 
the  "glory  of  going  on,"  the  joy  of  dis- 
covering unwon  territory  beyond  the  mar- 
gin of  each  spiritual  conquest. 

Poverty  of  spirit  —  another  beatitude- 
trait  —  is  bound  up  with  hunger  for  good- 
ness as  the  convex  side  of  a  curve  is  bound 
up  with  the .  concave  side.  They  are 
different  aspects  of  the  same  attitude. 
The  poor  in  spirit  are  by  no  means  poor- 
spirited.  They  are  persons  who  see  so 
much  to  be,  so  much  to  do,  such  limitless 
reaches  to  life  and  goodness  that  they 
are  profoundly  conscious  of  their  insuffi- 
ciency and  incompleteness.  Self-satisfac- 
tion and  pride  of  spiritual  achievement 
are  washed  clean  out  of  their  nature. 
They  are  open-hearted,  open-windowed 
to  all  truth,  possessed  of  an  abiding 
disposition  to  receive,  impressed  with  a 
sense  of  inner  need  and  of  childlike  de- 
pendence. Just  that  attitude  is  its  own 
sure  reward.     By  an  unescapable  spiritual 


20  THE   INNER   LIFE  [Ch.  I 

gravitation  the  best  things  in  the  universe 
belong  to  open-hearted,  open-windowed 
souls.  Again,  in  the  beatitude  on  the 
mourner,  He  reverses  the  Pharisaic  and 
popular  judgment.  Losses  and  crosses, 
pains  and  burdens,  heartaches  and  bereave- 
ments, empty  chairs  and  darkened  win- 
dows, are  the  antipodes  of  our  desires  and 
last  of  all  things  to  be  expected  in  the  list 
of  beatitudes.  They  were  then,  and  still 
often  are,  counted  as  visitations  of  divine 
disapproval.  Christ  rejects  the  superficial 
way  of  measuring  the  success  of  a  life  by 
the  smoothness  of  its  road  or  by  its  free- 
dom from  trial,  and  He  will  not  allow  the 
false  view  to  stand ;  namely,  that  success 
is  the  reward  of  piety,  and  trouble  the 
return  for  lack  of  righteousness.  There 
is  no  way  to  depth  of  life,  to  richness  of 
spirit,  by  shun-pikes  that  go  around  hard 
experiences.  The  very  discovery  of  the 
nearness  of  God,  of  the  sustaining  power 
of  His  love,  of  the  sufficiency  of  His  grace, 
has  come  to  men  in  all  ages  through  pain, 
and  suffering  and  loss.     We  always  go  for 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  21 

comfort  to  those  who  have  passed  through 
deeps  of  life  and  we  may  well  trust  Christ 
when  He  tells  us  that  it  is  not  the  lotus- 
eater  but  the  sufferer  who  is  in  the  way 
of  blessing  and  is  forming  the  spirit  of 
the  Kingdom. 

Meekness  and  mercy  and  peace-making 
are  high  among  the  qualities  that  charac- 
terize the  inner  spirit  of  the  kingdom. 
Patience,  endurance,  steadfastness,  con- 
fidence in  the  eternal  nature  of  things, 
determination  to  win  by  the  slow  method 
that  is  right  rather  than  by  the  quick  and 
strenuous  method  that  is  wrong  are  other 
ways  of  naming  meekness.  Mercy  is 
tenderness  of  heart,  ability  to  put  oneself 
in  another's  place,  confidence  in  the  power 
of  love  and  gentleness,  the  practice  of 
forgiveness  and  the  joyous  bestowal  of 
sympathy.  Peace-making  is  the  divine 
business  of  drawing  men  together  into 
unity  of  spirit  and  purpose,  teaching 
them  to  live  the  love-way,  and  forming 
in  the  very  warp  and  woof  of  human 
society  the  spirit  of  altruism  and  loyalty 


22  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

to  the  higher  interests  of  the  group. 
These  traits  belong  to  the  inmost  nature 
of  God  and  of  course  those  who  have  them 
are  blessed,  and  it  is  equally  clear  that 
the  Kingdom  is  theirs.  There  is  further- 
more, in  this  happy  way  of  life,  a  condition 
of  heart  to  which  the  vision  of  God  in- 
herently attaches.  He  is  no  longer  argued 
about  and  speculated  upon.  He  is  seen 
and  felt.  He  becomes  as  sure  as  the  sky 
above  us  or  our  own  pulse  beat  within  us. 
We  spoil  our  vision  with  selfishness,  we 
Icloud  it  with  prejudices,  we  blur  it  with 
impure  aims.  We  cast  our  own  shadow 
across  our  field  of  view  and  make  a  dark 
eclipse.  It  is  not  better  spectacles  we 
need.  It  is  a  pure,  clean,  sincere,  loving, 
forgiving,  passionately  devoted  heart. 
God  who  is  love  can  be  seen,  can  be  found, 
only  by  a  heart  that  intensely  loves  and 
that  hates  everything  that  hinders  love. 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  23 

IV 

THE    WAY    OF    CONTAGION 

We  have  seen  that  religion  cannot  be 
sundered  from  the  intellectual  currents, 
or  from  the  moral  undertakings,  or  from 
the  social  tasks  of  the  world.  It  cannot 
be  merely  inward.  It  can  preserve  its 
inward  power  only  as  it  lives  in  actual 
correspondence  with  its  whole  environ- 
ment and  becomes  also  outward.  But  the 
primary  thing  for  Christ,  we  saw,  was  the 
attainment  of  an  inner  spirit,  the  seed- 
spirit  of  the  Kingdom,  the  spirit  of  the 
beatitudes  —  the  attainment  of  a  type 
of  life  to  which  blessedness  inherently 
attaches. 

The  question  at  once  arises,  how  shall 
this  inner  spirit  be  spread  and  propagated  'i 
How  is  religion  of  the  inner  type  to  grow 
and  expand  t  There  are  two  character- 
istic ways  of  propagating  religious  ideas, 
of  carrying  spiritual  discoveries  into  the 
life  of  the  world.  One  way  is  the  way  of 
organization;    the  other  way  is  the  way  of 


24  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

contagion.  The  way  of  organization,  which 
is  as  old  as  human  history,  is  too  familiar 
to  need  any  description.  Our  age  has 
almost  unlimited  faith  in  it.  If  we  wish 
to  carry  a  live  idea  into  action,  we  or- 
ganize. We  select  officials.  We  make 
"motions."  We  pass  resolutions.  We  ap- 
point committees  or  boards  or  commis- 
sions. We  hold  endless  conferences.  We 
issue  propaganda  material.  We  have 
street  processions.  We  use  placards  and 
billboards.  We  found  institutions,  and 
devise  machinery.  We  have  collisions 
between  "pros"  and  "antis"  and  stir 
up  enthusiasm  and  passion  for  our 
"cause."  The  Christian  Church  is  prob- 
ably the  most  impressive  instance  of 
organization  in  the  entire  history  of 
man's  undertakings.  It  has  become,  in 
its  historical  development,  almost  in- 
finitely complex,  with  organizations 
within  organizations  and  suborganiza- 
tions  within  suborganizations.  It  has 
employed  every  known  expedient,  even 
the    sword,    for    the    advancement   of   its 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER   WAY  25 

"cause,"  It  has  created  a  perfect  maze 
of  institutions  and  it  has  originated  a 
vast  variety  of  educational  methods  for 
carrying  forward  its  truth. 

But  great  as  has  been  the  historical 
emphasis  on  organization,  it  nevertheless 
occupies  a  very  slender  place  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  Christ.  There  is  no  clear 
indication  that  He  appointed  any  officials, 
or  organized  any  society,  or  founded  any 
institution.  There  are  two  "sayings"  in 
Matthew  which  use  the  word  "Church," 
but  they  almost  certainly  bear  the  mark 
and  coloring  of  a  later  time,  when  the 
Church  had  already  come  into  existence 
and  had  formed  its  practices  and  its 
traditions.  And  even  though  the  great 
"saying"  at  Csesarea  Philippi  were  ac- 
cepted as  the  actual  words  of  Jesus,  it  is 
still  quite  possible  to  see  in  it  the  an- 
nouncement of  a  spiritual  fellowship, 
spreading  by  inspiration  and  contagion, 
rather  than  the  founding  of  an  official 
institution.  It  is,  no  doubt,  fortunate 
on   the   whole   that   the   Church   was   or- 


26  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

ganized,  and  that  the  great  idea  found  a 
visible  body  through  which  to  express  it- 
self, though  nobody  can  fail  to  see  that 
the  Church,  while  meaning  to  propagate 
the  gospel,  has  always  profoundly  modified 
and  transformed  it,  and  that  it  has  brought 
into  play  a  great  many  tendencies  foreign 
to  the  original  gospel. 

Christ's  way  of  propagating  the  truth 
—  the  way  that  inherently  fits  the  inner 
life  and  spirit  of  the  gospel  of  the  King- 
dom —  was  the  way  of  personal  con- 
tagion. Instead  of  founding  an  institu- 
tion, or  organizing  an  official  society,  or 
forming  a  system,  or  creating  external 
machinery.  He  counted  almost  wholly 
upon  the  spontaneous  and  dynamic  in- 
fluence of  life  upon  life,  of  personality 
upon  personality.  He  would  produce  a 
new  world,  a  new  social  order,  through 
the  contagious  and  transmissive  character 
of  personal  goodness.  He  practically  ig- 
nored, or  positively  rejected,  the  method 
of  restraint^  and  trusted  absolutely  to  the 
conquering  power  of  loyalty  and  consecra- 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  27 

tion.  It  was  His  faith  that,  if  you  get 
into  the  world  anywhere  a  seed  of  the 
Kingdom,  a  nucleus  of  persons  who  ex- 
hibit the  blessed  life,  who  are  dedicated 
to  expanding  goodness,  who  rely  im- 
plicitly on  love  and  sympathy,  who  try 
in  meek  patience  the  slow  method  that 
is  right,  who  still  feel  the  clasping  hands 
of  love  even  when  they  go  through  pain 
and  trial  and  loss,  this  seed-spirit  will 
spread,  this  nucleus  will  enlarge  and 
create  a  society.  If  the  new  spirit  of 
passionate  love,  and  of  uncalculating  good- 
ness gets  formed  in  one  person,  by  a 
silent  alchemy  a  group  of  persons  will 
soon  become  permeated  and  charged  with 
the  same  spirit,  new  conditions  will  be 
formed,  and  in  time  children  will  be  born 
into  a  new  social  environment.and  will  suck 
in  new  ideals  with  their  mother's  milk. 

Persons  of  the  blessed  life,  Christ  says, 
are  the  saving  salt  of  the  earth.  They 
carry  their  wholesome  savor  into  every- 
thing they  touch.  They  do  not  try  to 
save    themselves.      They    are    ready    like 


28  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

salt  to  dissolve  and  disappear,  but,  the 
more  they  give  themselves  away,  the 
more  antiseptic  and  preservative  they 
become  to  the  society  in  which  they  live. 
They  keep  the  old  world  from  spoiling 
and  corrupting  not  by  attack  and  re- 
straint, not  by  excision  and  amputation, 
but  by  pouring  the  preservative  savor  of 
their  lives  of  goodness  into  all  the  chan- 
nels of  the  world.  This  preservative  and 
saving  influence  on  society  depends,  how- 
ever, entirely  on  the  continuance  of  the 
inner  quality  of  life  and  it  will  be  certain 
to  cease  if  ever  the  salt  lose  its  savor,  i.e. 
if  the  soul  of  religion  wanes  or  dies  away 
and  only  the  outer  form  of  it  remains. 

But  such  lives  are  more  than  antiseptic 
and  preservative ;  they  are  kindling  and 
illuminative.  They  become  "candles  of 
the  Lord."  Candles  emit  their  light  and 
kindle  other  candles  by  burning  them- 
selves up  and  transmitting  their  flame. 
When  a  life  is  set  on  fire,  and  is  radiant 
with  self-consuming  love,  it  will  invariably 
set  other  lives  on  fire.     Such  a  person  may 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  29 

teach  many  valuable  ideas,  he  may  organize 

many  movements,  he  may  attack  many  evil 
customs,  but  the  best  thing  he  will  ever  do 
will  be  to  fuse  and  kindle  other  souls  with 
the  fire  of  his  passion.  His  own  burning, 
shining  life  is  always  his  supreme  service. 

"The  greatest  legacy  the  hero  leaves  his  race 
Is  —  to  have  been  a  hero." 

Such  a  person  will  be  eager  to  decrease 
that  his  kindling  power  may  increase. 
He  will  not  care  to  save  himself,  or  to 
reap  a  reward  for  his  service.  He  may 
not  even  know  that  he  is  shining,  like  the 
early  saint  who  "wist  not  that  his  face 
did  shine."  But  for  all  that,  men  will 
see  the  way  by  his  light  and  will  catch 
the  glory  of  living  because  he  exhibits  it. 
He  can  no  more  be  hid  than  can  a  hill-top 
city,  or  the  headlight  of  a  locomotive,  or 
the  newly  risen  sun. 

That  is  Christ's  way  of  spreading  the 
life  of  the  Kingdom,  that  is  His  method 
of  propagating  the  inner  spirit,  and  of 
producing  a  society  of  blessed  people. 


30  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 


THE    SECOND    MILE 

It  may  seem  to  some  incongruous  to  be 
writing  about  an  inner  way  of  life  in  these 
days  when  action  is  felt  by  so  many  to  be 
the  only  reality  and  when  in  every  direc- 
tion outside  there  is  dire  human  need  to 
be  met. 

"Leave,  then,  your  wonted  prattle, 
The  oaten  reed  forbear; 
For  I  hear  a  sound  of  battle, 
And  trumpets  rend  the  air." 

But  more  than  ever  is  it  necessary  for 
us  to  center  down  to  eternal  principles 
of  life  and  action,  to  attain  and  maintain 
the  right  inner  spirit,  and  to  see  what  in 
its  faith  and  essence  Christianity  really 
means.  Precisely  now  when  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  seems  least  to  be  the  pro- 
gram of  action  and  the  map  of  life,  is  it 
a  suitable  time  for  us  to  endeavor  to  dis- 
cover what  Christ's  way  means,  by  look- 
ing  through   the   literal   phrases   in   clair- 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  31 

voyant  fashion  to  the  spirit  treasured  and 
embalmed  within  the  wonderful  words  ? 

There  is  one  phrase  which  seems  to  me 
to  be,  in  a  rare  and  peculiar  degree,  the 
key  to  the  entire  gospel  —  I  mean  the 
invitation  to  go  "the  second  mile": 
"If  any  man  compel  you  to  go  a  mile, 
go  two  miles."  It  is  always  dangerous, 
I  know,  to  fly  away  from  the  literal  sig- 
nificance of  words  and  to  indulge  in  far- 
fetched "spiritual"  interpretations.  But 
it  is  even  more  dangerous,  perhaps,  to 
read  words  of  oriental  imagery  and  para- 
dox as  though  they  were  the  plain  prose 
speech  of  the  occidental  mind,  and  to  be 
taken  only  at  their  face  value. 

There  will  probably  always  be  Tolstoys 
—  great  or  small  —  who  will  make  the 
difficult,  and  never  very  successful,  ex- 
periment of  taking  this  and  the  other 
"commands"  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount 
in  a  literal  and  legalistic  sense,  but  to  do 
so  is  almost  certainly  to  be  "slow  of 
heart,"  and  to  miss  Christ's  meaning. 
Whatever   else   may   be   true   or   false   in 


32  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

our  interpretations  of  the  teachings  of 
Christ,  it  may  always  be  taken  for  certain 
that  He  did  not  inaugurate  a  religion  of 
the  legalistic  type,  consisting  of  com- 
mands and  exact  directions,  to  be  liter- 
ally followed  and  obeyed  as  a  way  to 
secure  merit  and  reward.  To^  go  "the 
second  mile,"  then,  is  an  attitude  and 
character  of  spirit  rather  than  a  mere 
rule  and  formula  for  the  legs. 

Christ  always  shows  a  very  slender 
appreciation  of  any  act  of  religion  or  of 
ethics  which  does  not  reach  beyond  the 
stage  of  compulsion.  What  is  done  be- 
cause it  must  be  done ;  because  the  law 
requires  it,  or  because  society  expects  it, 
or  because  convention  prescribes  it,  or 
because  the  doer  of  it  is  afraid  of  conse- 
quences if  he  omits  it,  may,  of  course,  be 
rightly  done  and  meritoriously  done,  but 
an  act  on  that  level  is  not  yet  quite  in 
the  region  where  for  Christ  the  highest 
moral  and  religious  acts  have  their  spring. 
The  typical  Pharisee  was  an  appalling 
instance  of  the  inadequacy  of  "the  first- 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  33 

mile"  kind  of  religion  and  ethics.  He 
plodded  his  hard  mile,  and  "did  all  the 
things  required"  of  him.  In  the  region 
of  commands,  or  ''touching  the  law"  he 
was  "blameless."  But  there  was  no  spon- 
taneity in  his  religion,  no  free  initiative, 
no  enthusiastic  passion,  no  joyous  abandon, 
no  gratuitous  and  uncalculating  acts.  He 
did  things  enough,  but  he  did  them  be- 
cause he  had  to  do  them,  not  because 
some  mighty  love  possessed  him  and 
flooded  him  and  inspired  him  to  go  not 
only  the  expected  mile,  but  to  go  on 
without  any  calculation  out  beyond  mile- 
stones altogether.  Just  here  appears  the 
new  inner  way  of  Christ's  religion.  The 
legalist,  like  the  rich  young  man,  "does 
all  the  things  that  are  commanded  in 
the  law,"  but  still  painfully  "lacks" 
something.  To  get  into  Christ's  way, 
to  "follow"  in  any  real  sense,  he  must 
cut  his  cables  and  swing  out  from  the 
moorings  where  he  is  tied.  He  must 
catch  such  a  passion  of  love  that  giving 
either  of  his   money  or  of  himself,    shall 


34  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

no  longer  be   for   him   an   imposed   duty 
but  rather  a  joy  of  spirit. 

The  parable  of  the  "great  surprise"  is 
another  illustration,  a  glorious  illustra- 
tion, of  the  spirit  of  the  "second  mile." 
The  "blessed  ones"  in  the  picture  (which 
is  an  unveiling  of  actual  everyday  life  in 
its  eternal  meaning  rather  than  a  por- 
traiture of  the  day  of  judgment)  find 
themselves  at  home  with  God,  drawn 
into  His  presence,  crowned  with  His 
approval,  and  sealed  with  His  fellowship. 
They  are  surprised.  They  had  not  been 
adding  up  their  merits  or  calculating 
their  chances  of  winning  heaven.  They 
are  beautifully  artless  and  naive:  "When 
saw  we  Thee  hungry  and  fed  Thee.^" 
They  have  been  doing  deeds  of  love,  say- 
ing kind  words,  relieving  human  need, 
banishing  human  loneliness,  making  life 
easier  and  more  joyous,  because  they 
had  caught  a  spirit  of  love  and  tender- 
ness, and,  therefore,  "could  not  do  other- 
wise," and  now  they  suddenly  discover 
that  those  whom  they  helped  and  rescued 


Ch.  I]  THE   INNER  WAY  35 

and  served  were  bound  up  in  one  insepa- 
rable life  with  God  himself,  so  that  what 
was  done  to  them  was  done  to  Him,  and 
they  find  that  their  spontaneous  and  un- 
calculating  love  was  one  in  essence  and 
substance  with  the  love  of  God  and  that 
they  are  eternally  at  home  with  Him. 

The  tender,  immortal  stories  of  the 
woman  who  broke  her  alabaster  vase  of 
precious  nard  and  "filled  all  the  house 
with  the  odor,"  and  of  the  woman  (per- 
haps the  same  one)  who  had  been  a 
sinner  and  who  from  her  passion  of  love 
for  her  great  forgiveness  wet  Christ's 
feet  with  her  tears,  even  before  she  could 
open  her  cruse  of  ointment,  are  the  finest 
possible  illustrations  of  the  spirit  of  "the 
second  mile."  They  picture,  in  subtly 
suggestive  imagery,  the  immense  contrast 
between  the  spontaneous,  uncalculating 
act  of  one  who  "loves  much"  and  does 
with  grace  what  love  prompts ;  and  acts, 
on  the  other  hand,  like  that  of  Simon 
the  pharisaic  host,  who  offers  Jesus  a 
purely    conventional    and    grudging    hos- 


36  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

pitality,  or  like  that  of  the  disciples  who 
sit  indeed  at  the  table  with  Jesus  but 
come  to  it  absorbed  with  the  burning 
question,  *^who  among  us  is  to  be  first 
and  greatest,"  not  only  at  the  table  but 
"in  the  Kingdom!" 

What  grace  and  unexpected  love  come 
into  action  in  the  simple  deed  of  the 
"Samaritan"  who,  from  nobility  of  na- 
ture, does  what  official  Priest  and  Levite 
leave  undone  !  The  hated  foreigner,  spit 
at  and  stoned  as  he  walked  the  roads  of 
Judea,  under  no  obligation  to  be  kind  or 
serviceable,  is  the  real  "neighbor,"  the 
bearer  of  balm  and  healing,  the  dispenser 
of  love  and  sympathy.  He  may  have 
no  ordination  to  the  priesthood,  but  he 
finely  exhibits  the  attitude  of  grace  which 
belongs  in  the  religion  of  "the  second 
mile." 

But  we  do  not  reach  the  full  significance 
of  "the  second  mile"  until  we  see  that  it 
is  something  more  than  the  highest  level 
of  human  grace.  What  shines  through 
the   gospels   everywhere,   like   a   new-risen 


Ch.  I]  THE  INNER  WAY  37 

sun,  is  the  revelation  that  this  —  this 
grace  of  the  second  mile  —  is  the  supreme 
trait  and  character-nature  of  God  as 
well.  How  surprising  and  unexpected  is 
that  extraordinary  unveiling  of  the  divine 
nature  in  the  story  of  the  prodigal  boy ! 
It  is  wonderful  enough  that  one  who  has 
wasted  his  substance  and  squandered  his 
own  very  life  should  still  be  able  in  his 
squalor  and  misery  to  come  to  himself 
and  want  to  go  home ;  but  the  fact  which 
radiates  this  sublime  story  like  a  glory 
is  the  uncalculating,  ungrudging,  un- 
limited love  of  the  Father,  which  remains 
unchanged  by  the  boy's  blunder,  which 
has  never  failed  in  the  period  of  his  ab- 
sence, and  which  bursts  out  in  the  cry 
of  joy  :  "This  my  son  was  dead  and  is 
alive  again,  he  was  lost  and  is  found." 

It  is,  and  always  has  been,  the  very 
center  of  our  Christian  faith  that  the 
real  nature  and  character  of  God  come 
full  into  view  in  Christ,  that  God  is  in 
mind  and  heart  and  will  revealed  in  the 
Person     whom     we     call     Christ.     "The 


38  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  I 

grace,"  then,  "of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ," 
of  which  we  are  reminded  in  that  great 
word  of  apostolic  benediction,  is  a  true 
manifestation  of  the  deepest  nature  and 
character  of  God  Himself.  The  Cross 
is  not  an  artificial  scheme.  The  Cross 
is  the  eternal  grace,  the  spontaneous, 
uncalculating  love  of  God  made  visible 
and  vocal  in  our  temporal  world.  It  is 
the  apotheosis  of  the  spirit  of  the  second 
mile. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL 

I 

BAGS   THAT   WAX    NOT   OLD 

The  ancient  world  found  it  very  diffi- 
cult to  keep  money  even  after  it  was  got. 
There  were  almost  constant  wars  involv- 
ing the  dire  stripping  of  the  unprotected 
country  districts,  and  the  siege  and  devas- 
tation of  cities.  In  those  times  almost 
everything  was  fragile.  It  was  never  easy 
to  discover  any  form  of  wealth  that  was 
surely  abiding.  Even  if  the  besom  of  an 
invading  army  did  not  sweep  away  the 
labor  of  years,  still  there  were  other 
enemies  to  be  feared.  Tyrants  were  al- 
ways on  the  watch  for  ways  of  relieving 
wealthy  men  of  their  treasures.  There 
were  robber  bands  lying  in  wait  for  the 
traveler,  and  neighborhood  thieves  found 

39 


40  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

it  a  small  matter  to  break  into  private 
houses  and  to  steal  hidden  money.  It 
was  no  uncommon  thing  for  men  to  dig 
in  the  ground  and  hide  the  talent  which 
they  had  saved,  or  to  bury  the  pearl  of 
great  price,  or  other  precious  jewel,  in  a 
field.  If  one  invested  his  wealth  in  gar- 
ments, then  another  enemy  was  to  be 
feared.  The  moth  is  as  old  as  clothes, 
and  he  got  in  even  where  the  thief  failed 
to  break  through. 

The  problem  of  getting  an  indestructible 
money-bag  was,  thus,  a  problem  of  first 
importance.  A  journey  to  Jericho  might 
any  day  reduce  a  man  to  primitive  con- 
ditions, or  a  passing  army  might  make 
him  a  beggar,  or  the  visit  of  a  thief  might 
strip  him  of  all  his  living,  or  the  silent 
work  of  a  brood  of  moths  might  ruin  the 
savings  of  years.  There  were  no  perdur- 
able purses,  no  nonbreakable  banks,  no 
irreducible  forms  of  wealth. 

Christ  evidently  recognized  that  there 
was  a  value  in  money.  He  did  not  ap- 
parently   demand    from    his    follower    the 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL    41 

absolute  renunciation  of  ownership.  He 
expounded  no  new  theory  of  economics. 
But  he  was  profoundly  impressed  by  the 
moral  havoc  and  the  social  calamities 
caused  by  the  excessive  ambition  for,  and 
pursuit  of,  wealth.  He  saw  how  the  mad 
rush  for  money  and  the  overvaluation 
of  it  killed  out  the  noblest  fundamental 
traits  of  the  soul,  and,  more  than  all 
else,  he  felt  the  tragedy  of  human  lives 
being  focused  with  intensity  of  strain 
and  fixed  with  burning  passion  on  the 
pursuit  of  such  pitiably  fragile  treasures 
—  money-bags  of  all  sorts  waxing  old 
and  becoming  incapable  of  holding  the 
hoard  that  absorbed  the  whole  life. 

Christ,  then,  proposes  a  new  kind  of 
purse,  an  indestructible  and  immutable 
treasure-bag  —  "make  for  yourselves  bags 
that  wax  not  old."  Such  purses  are  not 
on  the  market,  they  cannot  be  purchased, 
they  must  be  woven  by  each  person  for 
himself,  and  they  must  be  woven,  if  at 
all,  out  of  the  stuff  of  life  itself.  We  here 
pass  over,  as  so  often  in  Christ's  teaching, 


42  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

from  extrinsic  wealth  to  intrinsic,  from 
the  wealth  which  men  merely  possess  to 
the  kind  of  wealth  which  they  can  them- 
selves be.  We  once  more  find  ourselves 
brought  to  an  inner  way  of  living,  where 
the  issue  is  no  longer  how  to  accumulate 
goods,  but  rather  how  to  become  good. 
The  problem  is  the  problem  of  what  men 
live  by.  We  are  called  to  loosen  our 
grip  on  perishable  treasures  only  that  we 
may  tighten  our  hold  on  heavenly,  i.e. 
spiritual,  treasure.  We  are  shown  the 
folly  of  spending  a  life  building  barns  for 
expanding  earthly  possessions,  while  we 
are  taking  no  pains  to  make  ourselves 
rich  in  God. 

What  is  it,  then,  that  men  live  by  "i 
What  will  prove  to  be  imperishable  wealth, 
whether  we  are  in  this  world,  or  in  any 
other  world  of  real  moral  issues  1  It  is 
obviously  not  money,  for  men  often  live 
nobly  after  the  money-bag  has  waxed  old 
and  after  the  bank  has  failed,  and  it  is  our 
most  elemental  faith  that  life  blossoms 
out  into  its  consummate  richness  after  all 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     43 

earthly  affairs  come  to  a  complete  close, 
and  after  every  penny  of  visible  wealth 
has  been  left  forever  behind.  Money  is 
plainly  not  intrinsic  treasure ;  love  is, 
goodness  is,  joy  is.  A  beloved  disciple, 
in  a  moment  of  inspiration,  announced 
the  profound  truth  that  love  is  ''of  God." 
Men  wrongly  divide  love  into  two  types, 
"human  love"  and  "divine  love,"  but 
in  reality  there  is  only  love.  Wherever 
love  has  become  the  nature  of  the  soul, 
and  it  has  become  "natural"  now  to  for- 
get self  for  others,  to  seek  to  give  rather 
than  to  get,  to  share  rather  than  to  pos- 
sess, to  be  impoverished  in  order  that 
some  loved  one  may  abound,  there  a 
divine  and  Godlike  spirit  has  been  formed. 
And  we  now  come  upon  a  new  kind  of 
wealth,  a  kind  that  accumulates  with  use, 
because  it  is  a  law  that  the  more  the  spirit 
of  love  is  exercised,  the  more  the  soul 
spends  itself  in  love,  so  much  the  more 
love  it  has,  the  richer  it  grows,  the 
diviner  its  nature  becomes.  But  at  the 
same  time,  it  is  a  fact  that  love  is  never 


44  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

complete,  never  reaches  its  full  scope  and 
measure  until  our  love  takes  on  an  eternal 
aspect  —  until  we  love  God  in  Himself 
or  love  Him  in  our  loved  ones.  One 
reason  why  love  is  exalted  by  death  is 
that  we  no  longer  love  our  immortal  loved 
one  in  any  narrow  and  selfish  way ;  we 
love  now  for  pure  love's  sake,  and  the 
truest  of  all  treasures  which  can  be  laid 
up  in  imperishable  bags  is  this  stock  of 
unalloyed  love  for  that  which  is  most 
lovely  —  for  God  and  for  souls  that  are 
given  to  us  to  bring  some  of  His  nature 
closer  to  our  human  hearts. 

Goodness  is,  of  course,  notoriously  hard 
to  define.  It  is  never  an  abstract  quality 
that  can  be  described  by  logical  concepts. 
It  is  a  way  of  living,  a  way  of  acting,  a 
way  of  working  out  relationships.  It  is, 
like  love,  a  cumulative  thing.  To  be 
good  inherently  means  to  be  becoming 
better,  to  be  on  the  way  to  an  unattained 
goal  of  action,  or  of  character.  It  is  the 
glory  of  going  on  to  be  perfect  like  our 
Father  in  heaven.     To  be  rich  in  goodness 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     45 

of  character,  therefore,  is  to  be  on  the  way 
to  become  ever  richer,  however  long  the- 
journey  lasts,  however  far  the  spiral  winds, 
for  goodness,  like  love,  is  of  God,  and 
steadily  assimilates  our  imperfect  human 
nature  to  the  perfect  divine  nature. 

Joy  is,  perhaps,  not  often  thought  of  as 
one  of  the  things  men  live  by,  as  the  souFs 
eternal  wealth.  Life  is  so  full  of  sorrow 
and  pain  that  joy  seems  like  a  fleeting, 
vanishing  asset.  But  that  is  because  joy 
is  confused  with  pleasure.  True  joy  is 
not  a  thing  of  moods,  not  a  capricious 
emotion,  tied  to  fluctuating  experiences. 
It  is  a  state  and  condition  of  the  soul. 
It  survives  through  pain  and  sorrow  and, 
like  a  subterranean  spring,  waters  the 
whole  life.  It  is  intimately  allied  and 
bound  up  with  love  and  goodness,  and  so 
is  deeply  rooted  in  the  life  of  God.  Joy 
is  the  most  perfect  and  complete  mark 
and  sign  of  immortal  wealth,  because  it 
indicates  that  the  soul  is  living  by  love 
and  by  goodness,  and  is  very  rich  in 
God. 


46  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

II 

OTHERISM 
{Matt.  VIL  I-I2) 

Altruism  is  an  honored  word.  Other- 
ism  is  only  recently  coined  and  has  not 
yet  become  widely  current  in  good  speech. 
We  need,  however,  a  word  that  has  more 
inward  depth  than  altruism  usually  carries, 
and  perhaps  otherism  will  eventually  take 
that  vacant  place. 

Not  merely  in  these  days  of  war,  but  in 
all  our  human  relations  all  the  time  we 
greatly  need  to  get  the  interior  vision 
';  which  enables  us  to  understand  from 
i  within  those  with  whom  we  live  and  work. 
Nobody  sees  life  correctly  until  he  has 
corrected  his  own  views  by  a  true  apprecia- 
tion of  the  views  of  others.  From  the 
outside  it  is  impossible  to  estimate  any  life 
fairly.  We  have  long  ago  learned  that 
we  can  get  no  true  account  of  any  historical 
character  unless  we  have  a  historian  who 
can  put  himself  in  the  place  of  the  person 
he  is  describing.     He  must  have  imagina- 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL    47 

tion  and  be  able  to  see  clearly  the  con- 
ditions and  forces,  the  influences  and  the 
atmosphere  in  which  the  man  lived.  The 
problems  which  he  had  to  deal  with,  the 
conceptions  which  governed  men's  thoughts 
when  he  lived  —  all  these  must  be  under- 
stood, before  we  can  get  any  estimate  of 
the  man  himself.  The  same  sort  of 
imagination  is  necessary  to  judge  the 
person  who  lives  next  door.  We  dare 
not  pronounce  upon  him  until  we  know 
all  that  he  has  to  face.  If  we  could  once 
feel  his  quivering  spirit  and  could  see 
his  inward  struggles,  we  could  not  set  up 
our  private  tribunal  and  pass  our  cold 
individual  judgment  upon  him.  The 
real  remedy  for  this  hard  critical  spirit 
which  breaks  society  up  into  independent 
units  is  the  spirit  of  love,  the  spirit  of 
otherism. 

The  moment  we  put  ourselves  in  the 
place  of  others,  and  pronounce  no  judgment 
upon  persons  until  we  have  seen  all  the 
circumstances  of  their  life,  a  new  state  of 
things    at    once    appears.     Genuine    sym- 


48  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

pathy,  clear  interior  insight  into  the 
personality  of  others,  immediately  creates 
a  new  world.  The  trouble  too  often  is 
!  that  we  see  all  the  defects  in  others  and 
forget  our  own.  We  want  to  take  the 
mote  out  of  another  person's  eye  while 
all  the  time  there  is  a  whole  fence  rail  in 
our  own.  Christ's  rule  is  to  make  one- 
self perfect  before  one  goes  to  correcting 
others.  "Let  him  who  is  without  sin 
cast  the  first  stone." 

There  is  another  situation  also  which 
would  be  remedied  if  we  learned  to  put 
ourselves  in  the  other  person's  place  —  if 
we  had  the  spirit  of  otherism.  Christ 
sums  it  up  in  the  proverb  about  casting 
pearls  before  swine,  i.e.  giving  what  is  a 
misfit.  Many  of  our  well-meant  charities 
are  of  this  sort.  We  blunder  in  our  efforts 
to  help  poor  needy  people,  because  we  do 
not  get  their  point  of  view.  We  do  not 
live  our  way  into  their  lives.  There  is  no 
fit  between  our  gift  and  their  need.  They 
get  a  stone  for  bread. 

The  same  thing  happens  in  much  of  our 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL    49 

public  speaking.  Many  persons  have  the 
barbarous  habit  of  never  imagining  the 
listeners'  point  of  view.  They  go  on 
speaking  as  unconscious  of  the  condition 
confronting  them  as  the  hose  pipe  is  when 
the  water  is  turned  on.  The  remedy 
again  is  otherism.  It  is  impossible  to 
help  anybody  with  a  message  until  you 
can  in  some  measure  share  his  life. 

"The  Holy  Supper  is  kept,  indeed, 
In  whatso  we  share  with  another's  need." 

This  teaching  is  all  summed  up  in  the 
golden  rule,  "All  things  that  ye  would 
that  men  should  do  unto  you  do  ye  also 
unto  them."  It  is  clear  at  once  that  to  do 
this  one  must  cultivate  both  his  spirit 
of  love  and  his  power  of  imagination.  It 
is  never  enough  to  want  to  help  a  person. 
We  must  put  ourself  in  his  place  and  be 
able  to  do  what  really  will  help  him.  It 
would  appear,  therefore,  that  the  most 
difficult  and  at  the  same  time  the  most 
heavenly  attainment  in  the  world  is 
sympathy  —  the  spirit  of  otherism. 


50  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

III 

SCAVENGERS  AND  THE  KINGDOM 

We  no  longer  expect  a  world  of  perfect 
conditions  to  appear  by  sudden  interven- 
tion. We  have  explained  so  many  things 
by  the  discovery  of  antecedent  develop- 
mental processes  that  we  have  leaped  to 
the  working  faith  that  all  things  come 
that  way.  We  do,  no  doubt,  find  un- 
bridged  gaps  in  the  enormous  series  of 
events  that  have  culminated  in  our  present 
world,  and  we  must  admit  that  nature 
seems  sometimes  to  desert  her  usual  placid 
way  of  process  for  what  looks  like  a  steeple- 
chase of  sudden  "jumps,"  but  we  feel 
pretty  sure  that  even  these  "jumps"  have 
been  slowly  prepared  for  and  are  themselves 
part  of  the  process-method. 

Then,  too,  we  find  it  very  difficult  to 
conceive  how  a  spiritual  kingdom  —  a 
world  which  is  built  and  held  together 
by  the  inner  gravitation  of  love  —  could 
come  by  a  fiat,  or  a  stroke,  or  a  jet.  The 
qualities  which  form  and  characterize  the 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     51 

kingdom  of  God  are  all  qualities  that  are 
born  and  cultivated  within  by  personal 
choices,  by  the  formation  of  rightly- 
fashioned  wills,  by  the  growth  of  love  and 
sympathy  in  the  heart,  by  the  creation  of 
pure  and  elevated  desires.  Those  traits 
must  be  won  and  achieved.  They  cannot 
be  shot  into  souls  from  without.  If, 
therefore,  we  are  to  expect  the  crowning 
age  that  shall  usher  in  a  world  in  which 
wrath  and  hate  no  longer  destroy,  from 
which  injustice  is  banished  and  the  central 
law  of  which  is  love  like  that  of  Christ's, 
then  we  must  look  for  this  age,  it  seems  to 
me,  to  come  by  slow  increments  and  gains 
of  advancing  personal  and  social  good- 
ness, and  by  divine  and  human  processes 
already  at  work  in  some  degree  in  the 
lives  of  men. 

Christ  often  seems  to  teach  this  view. 
There  is  a  strand  in  his  sayings  that 
certainly  implies  a  kingdom  coming  by  a 
long  process  of  slow  spiritual  gains.  There 
is  first  the  seed,  then  the  blade,  then  the 
ear  and  finally  the  full  corn  in  the  ear. 


52  THE   INNER   LIFE  [Ch.  II 

The  mustard  seed,  though  so  minute  and 
tiny,  is  a  type  of  the  kingdom  because  it 
contains  the  potentiality  of  a  vast  growth 
and  expansion.  The  yeast  is  likewise  a 
figure  of  ever-growing,  permeating,  pene- 
trating living  force  which  in  time  leavens 
the  whole  mass.  The  kingdom  is  fre- 
quently described  as  an  inner  life,  a 
victorious  spirit.  It  "comes"  when  God's 
will  is  done  in  a  person  as  it  is  done  in 
heaven,  and,  therefore,  it  is  not  a  spec- 
tacle to  be  "observed,"  like  the  passing 
of  Caesar's  legions,  or  the  installation  of  a 
new  ruler.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  there 
are  plainly  many  sayings  which  point 
toward  the  expectation  of  a  mighty  sud- 
den event.  We  seem,  again  and  again,  to 
be  hearing  not  of  process,  but  of  apocalypse, 
not  of  slow  development,  but  of  a  myste- 
rious leap.  There  can  be  no  question  that 
most  devout  Jews  of  the  first  century  ex- 
pected the  world's  relief  expedition  to  come 
by  miracle,  and  it  is  evident  that  there 
was  an  intense  hope  in  the  minds  of  men 
that,  in  one  way  or  another,  God  would 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     53 

intervene  and  put  things  right.  Many 
think  that  Christ  shared  that  hope  and 
expectation.  It  is  of  course  possible  that 
in  sharing,  as  He  did,  the  actual  life  of 
man.  He  partook  of  the  hopes  and  trav- 
ails and  expectations  of  His  times.  But, 
I  think,  we  need  to  go  very  slowly  and 
cautiously  in  this  direction.  To  interpret 
Christ's  message  mainly  in  terms  of 
apocalypse  and  sudden  interventions  is 
surely  to  miss  its  naturalness,  its  spiritual 
vision,  and  its  inward  depth.  We  can  well 
admit  that  nobody  then  had  quite  our 
modern  conception  of  process  or  our  pres- 
ent day  dislike  of  breaks,  interruptions, 
and  interventions.  There  was  no  difficulty 
in  thinking  of  a  new  age  or  dispensation 
miraculously  inaugurated.  Only  it  looks 
as  though  Christ  had  discovered  an  ethical 
and  spiritual  way  which  made  it  unneces- 
sary to  count  on  miracle.  There  was  much 
refuse  to  be  consumed,  much  corruption  to 
be  removed,  before  the  new  condition  of 
life  could  be  in  full  play,  but  He  seems  to 
have  seen  that  the  consuming  fire  and  the 


54  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

cleansing  work  were  an  essential  and  in- 
herent part  of  the  process  that  was  bring- 
ing the  kingdom. 

When  he  was  asked  where  men  were  to 
look  for  the  kingdom,  His  answer  was 
that  they  were  to  find  a  figure  and  parable 
of  it  in  the  normal  process  of  nature's 
scavengers.  The  carcass  lies  decaying  in 
the  sun,  corrupting  the  air  and  tainting 
everything  in  its  region.  There  can  be 
no  wholesome  conditions  of  life  in  that 
spot  until  the  corruption  is  removed.  But 
nature  has  provided  a  way  of  cleansing  the 
air.  The  scavenger  comes  and  removes 
the  refuse  and  corruption  and  turns  it 
by  a  strange  alchemy  into  living  matter. 
Life  feeds  on  the  decaying  refuse,  raises 
it  back  into  life,  and  cleanses  the  world  by 
making  even  corruption  minister  to  its 
own  life  processes.  We  could  not  live  an 
hour  in  our  world  if  it  were  not  alive  with 
a  myriad  variety  of  scavenging  methods 
that  burn  up  effete  matter,  transmute 
noxious  forms  into  wholesome  stuff,  cleanse 
away  the  poisons,  and  transmute,  not  by 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     55 

an  apocalypse,  but  by  a  process,  death  into 
life  and  corruption  into  sweetness.  May 
not  the  vulture,  like  the  tiny  sparrow  who 
cannot  fall  without  divine  regard,  be  a 
sign,  a  figure,  a  parable  ?  When  we  look 
for  the  kingdom,  in  the  light  of  this  sign, 
we  shall  not  search  the  clouds  of  heaven, 
we  shall  not  consult  "the  number  of  the 
beast"  —  we  shall  look  for  it  wherever 
we  see  life  conquering  death,  wherever  the 
white  tents  of  love  are  pitched  against  the 
black  tents  of  hate,  wherever  the  living 
forces  of  goodness  are  battering  down  the 
strongholds  of  evil,  wherever  the  sinner 
is  being  changed  to  a  saint,  wherever 
ancient  survivals  of  instinct  and  custom 
are  yielding  to  the  sway  of  growing  vision 
and  insight  and  ideal.  It  is  "slow  and 
late"  to  come,  this  kingdom!  So  was 
life  slow  to  come,  while  all  that  was  to  be 

"Whirl'd  for  a  million  aeons  thro'  the  vast 
Waste  dawn  of  multitudinous-eddying  light." 

So  was  man  slow  to  come,  while  fan- 
tastic creatures  were  "tearing  each  other 


56  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

in  the  slime."     So  was   a  spirit-governed 

Person  slow  to  come,  while  men  lived  in 

lust  and  war  and  hate.     But  in  God's  world 

at  length  the  things  that  ought  to  come  do 

come,  and  we  may  faintly  guess  by  what 

we  see  that  the  kingdom,  too,  is  coming. 

There   is   something  like   it  now  in   some 

lives. 

IV 

"  THE    BEYOND    IS  WITHIN  " 

Among  the  parables  of  Christ  there  is 
a  very  impressive  one  on  the  shut  door. 
It  is  a  story  of  ten  country  maidens  who 
were  invited  to  a  wedding.  They  were  to 
meet  the  bridegroom  coming  from  a  dis- 
tance, as  soon  as  his  arrival  should  be 
announced,  and  with  their  lighted  lamps 
they  were  to  guide  him  and  his  attendants 
through  the  darkness  to  the  home  of  the 
bride,  where  the  banquet  and  the  festal 
dance  were  to  be  held. 

For  many  days  these  simple  maidens 
had  been  living  in  the  thrilling  expecta- 
tion of  the  great  event  in  which  they  were 
to  take  a  leading  part. 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     57 

They  had  been  busy  with  their  prepara- 
tions, drilling  their  rhythmic  steps,  and 
talking  eagerly  of  the  approaching  night. 
But  five  of  them  foolishly  neglected  the 
critically  important  part  of  the  prepara- 
tion —  they  took  no  oil  to  supply  their 
lamps  and  at  the  dramatic  moment  they 
found  themselves  compelled  to  withdraw 
from  the  joyous  throng  and  to  go  in  search 
of  the  necessary  equipment.  When  at 
length  they  arrived  with  their  oil,  the 
illuminated  procession  was  over  and  the 
door  of  the  festal  house  was  shut. 

The  simple  maidens  soon  discovered 
that  there  was  a  stern  finality  to  this 
shut  door.  Their  blunder  had  irrevocable 
consequences.  They  may  have  had  other 
interesting  opportunities  as  life  went  on, 
but  they  forever  missed  this  joyous  pro- 
cession and  this  wedding  feast.  "Too 
late,  too  late.     Ye  cannot  enter  now." 

Christ  turns  this  common,  trivial  neigh- 
borhood incident  into  a  parable  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God.  Those  who  believe 
that  He  was  looking,  as  so  many  in  His 


58  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

time  were  looking,  for  a  sudden  shift  of 
dispensations  and  for  a  Kingdom  to  be 
ushered  in  by  a  stupendous  apocalyptic 
event,  find  in  this  irrevocably  shut  door 
of  the  parable  a  figure  of  the  doom  of 
those  who  failed  to  prepare  for  the  sudden 
coming  of  this  crisis,  decisive  of  the  destiny 
of  men. 

But  there  is  another,  and,  I  think,  a 
truer,  way  of  interpreting  this  shut  door. 
There  is  a  stern  finality  to  all  opportuni- 
ties that  have  been  missed  and  to  all  high 
occasions  that  have  been  blundered  and 
bungled.  All  decisions  of  the  will,  all 
choices  of  life  have,  in  their  very  nature, 
apocalyptic  finality.  They  suddenly  re- 
veal and  unveil  character  and  they  are 
loaded  with  destiny  which  can  be  changed 
only  by  a  change  of  character.  Other 
opportunities  may  offer  themselves  and 
new  chances  may  indeed  come,  but  when 
any  choice  has  been  made  or  any  oppor- 
tunity has  been  missed  that  chance  has 
gone  by  and  that  door  is  shut. 

The    football    player    who    has    had    a 


Ch.  II]    KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     59 

chance  in  the  great  game  of  the  year  to 
make  a  goal,  and  instead  of  doing  it 
fumbled  the  ball  and  lost  the  opportunity 
to  score,  may  just  possibly  have  another 
chance  sometime,  but  no  apologies  and 
no  explanations  can  ever  change  the 
apocalyptic  finality  of  that  fumble. 

Something  like  that  is  involved  in  all 
the  spiritual  issues  of  life,  and  our  deeds 
and  attitudes  are  all  the  time  irrevocably 
opening  or  shutting  doors,  which  prove 
to  be  doors  to  the  Kingdom  of  God. 
Christ  may  possibly  at  times  have  looked 
for  some  sudden  revelation  of  destiny, 
but  surely  for  the  most  part  He  looked 
for  the  momentous  issues  of  the  Kingdom 
within  the  soul  itself  rather  than  in  a 
spectacular  event  in  the  outer  world. 
This  principle  throws  light  on  all  Christ's 
sayings  about  the  future.  The  coming 
destiny  is  not  in  the  stars,  it  is  not  in  the 
sentence  of  a  Great  Assize,  it  is  not  in  the 
sudden  shift  of  "dispensations";  it  is  in 
the  character  and  inner  nature,  as  they 
have  been  formed  within  each  soul.     The 


6o  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

thing  to  be  concerned  about  is  not  so  much 
a  day  of  judgment  or  an  apocalyptic 
moment,  as  the  trend  of  the  will,  the  atti- 
tude of  the  spirit,  the  formation  of  inner 
disposition  and  character.  We  are  al- 
ways facing  issues  of  an  eternal  aspect, 
and  every  day  is  a  day  of  judgment,  re- 
vealing the  line  of  march  and  the  issues 
of  destiny.  Conversion  crises  are  for- 
tunately possible,  when  suddenly  a  new 
level  of  life  may  be  reached  and  a  fresh 
start  may  be  made,  and  in  this  inner 
world  of  personality,  there  are  always  new 
possibilities  occurring,  but,  as  at  oriental 
marriage  feasts,  neglected  opportunities 
are  irreversibly  neglected,  shut  doors  are 
irrevocably  shut,  and  blunders  that  affect 
the  issues  of  the  soul  have  an  apocalyptic 
finality  about  them.  New  dispensations 
may  await  us ;  the  Kingdom  may  come 
in  ways  we  never  dreamed  of ;  the  beyond 
may  be  more  momentous  than  we  have 
ever  expected,  but  always  and  everywhere 
"the  within"  determines  "the  beyond," 
and  character  is  destiny. 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     6 1 


THE    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    THE    UNSEEN 

"Nowhere  as  yet  has  history  spoken  in 
favor  of  the  ideal  of  a  moraUty  without 
religion.  New  active  forces  of  will,  so 
far  as  we  can  observe,  have  always  arisen 
in  conjunction  with  ideas  about  the  un- 
seen." So  wrote  the  great  German  his- 
torian and  philosopher,  Wilhelm  Dilthey. 
The  greatest  experts  in  the  field  both  of 
ethics  and  of  religion  agree  with  this  view. 
Henry  Sidgwick  and  Leslie  Stephen  are 
experts  in  the  field  of  ethics  who  cannot 
be  suspected  of  holding  a  brief  for  religion, 
and  yet  Sidgwick  says:  "Ethics  is  an 
imperfect  science  alone.  It  must  run 
up  into  religion  to  complete  itself;"  and 
Leslie  Stephen  says:  "Morality  and  re- 
ligion stand  or  fall  together."  Spinoza, 
who  was  denounced  during  his  lifetime  as 
an  atheist  and  a  destroyer  of  the  faith, 
nevertheless  makes  love  of  God  the  whole 
basis  of  genuine  ethics,  insisting  that  there 
is  no  morality  conceivable  without  love  of 


62  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

God.  St.  Augustine's  famous  testimony- 
may  suffice  as  a  religious  expert's  view. 
He  says,  "Love  God  and  then  you  may 
do  what  you  please,"  meaning,  of  course, 
that  you  cannot  then  approve  a  wrong 
course  of  action  or  of  life. 

Nowhere,  certainly,  are  religion  and 
ethics  so  wonderfully  fused  into  one  in- 
dissoluble whole  as  in  the  experience  and 
teaching  of  Christ.  This  appears  not 
only  in  His  supreme  rule  for  religion  and 
for  good  conduct :  "Thou  shalt  love  God 
with  all  thy  powers  and  thy  neighbor  as 
thyself,"  but  still  more  does  it  appear 
in  the  inner  steps  and  processes  which 
underlie  and  prepare  the  way  for  the 
decisions  and  acts  of  Christ's  own  life. 
Here,  unmistakably,  all  the  active  forces  of 
will  arose  in  conjunction  with  ideas  about 
the  unseen. 

It  is  the  modern  custom  to  talk  much 
about  the  ethics  of  Jesus  and  to  see  in  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  an  ideal  of  human 
personality  and  a  program  for  an  ideal 
social  order.     But  a  careful  reader  cannot 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL    63 

fail  to  feel  in  Christ's  teaching  the  com- 
plete fusion  of  His  ideal  for  the  individual 
and  for  society  with  His  consciousness  of 
the  world  of  unseen  realities.  The  new 
person  and  the  new  society  are  possible 
in  His  thought,  only  through  unbroken 
correspondence  with  the  world  of  higher 
forces  and  of  perfect  conditions.  The 
only  way  to  be  perfect  is  to  be  on  the  way 
toward  likeness  to  the  heavenly  Father, 
the  only  moral  dynamic  that  will  work 
is  a  love,  like  that  of  God's  love,  which 
expels  all  selfishness  and  all  tendency  to 
stop  at  partial  and  inadequate  goods. 
If  any  kingdom  of  heavenly  conditions 
is  ever  to  be  expected  on  earth,  if  ever 
we  may  hope  for  a  day  to  dawn  when  the 
divine  will  is  to  be  exhibited  among  men 
and  they  are  to  live  the  love-way  of 
goodness,  it  is  because  God  is  our  Father 
and  we  have  the  possibilities  of  His  nature. 
The  ethical  ideals  of  the  Kingdom  are 
inherently  attached  to  the  prayer  ex- 
perience of  Jesus.  The  kind  of  human 
world  which  His  faith  builds  for  men  is 


64  THE  INNER   LIFE  [Ch.  II 

forever  linked  to  the  kind  of  God  to  whom 
He  prays.  Cut  the  link  and  both  worlds 
fall  away.  We  cannot  shuffle  the  cold, 
hard,  loveless  atoms  of  our  social  world 
into  lovely  forms  of  cooperative  relation- 
ship. The  atoms  must  be  changed.  In 
some  way  we  must  learn  how  to  lift  men 
into  the  faith  which  Christ  had,  that  God 
is  the  Father  who  is  seeking  to  draw  us 
all  into  correspondence  with  His  unseen 
world  of  Life  and  Love.  "After  this 
manner  pray  ye.  Our  heavenly  Father 
of  the  holy  name,  thy  Kingdom  come, 
Thy  will  be  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in 
heaven."  The  two  faiths  make  one  faith 
—  the  faith  in  a  Father-God  who  cares, 
and  the  faith  in  the  realization  of  an  ideal 
society  based  on  cooperative  love. 

"And  as  He  was  praying,  the  fashion 
of  His  countenance  was  altered  and  His 
raiment  became  white  and  dazzling." 
This  is  a  simple,  synoptic  account  of  an 
experience  attaching  to  a  supreme  crisis 
of  personal  decision  in  the  life  of  Jesus. 
His   so-called   ethics,   as   I   have  been   in- 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     65 

sisting,  is  Indivisibly  bound  up  with  His 
attitude  toward  the  unseen,  with  His  ex- 
perience of  a  realm  where  what  ought  to 
be,  really  is.  So,  too,  it  is  because  He  has 
found  His  inward  relation  with  God  that 
He  makes  His  great  decision  to  go  forward 
toward  Jerusalem,  to  meet  the  onset  of 
opposition,  to  see  His  work  frustrated  by 
the  rulers  of  the  nation,  to  suffer  and  to 
die  at  the  hands  of  His  enemies.  The 
Transfiguration  has  been  treated  as  a 
myth  and  again  as  a  misplaced  resurrec- 
tion story.  But  it  is  certainly  best  to 
treat  it  as  a  genuine  psychological  narra- 
tive which  fits  reality  and  life  at  every 
point.  As  the  clouds  darken  and  the 
danger  threatens  and  the  successful  issue 
of  His  mission  seems  impossible,  Jesus 
falls  back  upon  God,  brings  His  spirit 
into  absolute  parallelism  with  the  heavenly 
will  and  accepts  whatever  may  be  in- 
volved in  the  pursuit  of  the  course  to 
which  He  is  committed.  When  He  pushes 
back  into  the  inner  experience  of  relation 
with  His  Father  and  the  circuit  of  con- 


66  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

nection  closes  and  living  faith  floods 
through  Him  and  fixes  His  decision  un- 
alterably to  go  forward,  His  face  and 
form  are  transfigured  and  illuminated 
through  the  experience  of  union.  This 
prayer  of  illumination  reported  in  the 
gospels,  is  not  an  isolated  instance,  a 
solitary  experience.  The  altered  face,  the 
changed  body,  the  glorified  figure,  the 
radiation  of  light,  have  marked  many  a 
subordinate  saint,  and  may  well  have 
characterized  the  Master  as  He  found 
the  true  attitude  of  soul  toward  the  unseen 
and  formed  His  momentous  decision  to 
be  faithful  unto  death  in  His  manifesta- 
tion of  love. 

In  Gethsemane,  as  the  awful  moment 
came  nearer,  once  more  we  catch  a  glimpse 
of  His  attitude  to  the  unseen.  In  place 
of  illuminated  form  and  shining  garments, 
we  hear  now  of  a  face  covered  with  the 
sweat  and  blood  of  agony.  Just  in  front 
are  the  shouting  rabble,  the  cross  and  the 
nails,  the  defeat  of  lifelong  hopes  and 
the  defection  of  the  inner  fellowship,  but 


Ch.   II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL     67 

the  triumphant  spirit  within  Him  unites 
with  the  infinite  will  that  is  steering  the 
world  and  piloting  all  lives,  and  calmly 
acquiesces  with  it.  But  to  this  suffering 
soul,  battling  in  the  dark  night  of  agony, 
the  infinite  will  is  no  abstract  Power,  no 
blind  fate,  to  be  dumbly  yielded  to.  The 
great  word  which  breaks  out  from  these 
quivering  lips  is  the  dear  word  for  "  Father  " 
that  the  little  child's  lips  have  learned  to 
say:  "Abba."  The  will  above  is  His  will 
now  and  He  goes  forward  to  the  pain  and 
death  in  the  strength  of  communion  and 
fellowship  with  His  Abba-Father.  There 
may  have  been  a  single  moment  of  desola-  r~^  ( 
tion  in  the  agony  of  the  next  day  when  the 
cry  escaped,  "My  God,  why  hast  thou 
forsaken  me.^"  but  immediately  the  inner 
spirit  recovers  its  connection  and  its  con- 
fidence and  the  crucifixion  ends,  as  it 
should,  with  the  words  of  triumphant 
faith,  "Father,  into  thy  hands  I  intrust 
my  spirit." 

The  most  important  fact  of  this  Life, 
which  has  ever  since  poured  Alpine  streams 


^^ 


68  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  II 

of  power  into  the  life  of  the  world,  is  its 
attitude  toward  the  unseen.  We  miss  the 
heart  of  things  when  we  reduce  the  gospel 
to  ethics  or  when  we  transform  it  into  dry 
theology.  Through  all  the  story  and  be- 
hind all  the  teaching  is  the  mighty  inner 
fact  of  an  intimate  personal  experience  of 
God  as  Father.  To  live  is  to  be  about  the 
"Father's  business."  In  great  moments 
of  intercourse  there  comes  to  Him  a  flood- 
ing consciousness  of  sonship,  joyous  both 
to  Father  and  Son:  "In  Him  I  am  well 
pleased,"  and  in  times  of  strain  and 
tragedy  the  onward  course  is  possible 
because  the  inner  bond  holds  fast  and  the 
Abba-experience  abides. 

It  is  not  strange  that  a  synoptic  writer 
reports  the  saying:  "No  man  knoweth 
the  Father  but  the  Son."  The  passage  as 
it  stands  reported  in  Matthew  may  be 
colored  by  later  theology,  but  there  is  a 
nucleus  of  absolute  truth  hidden  in  the 
saying.  There  is  no  other  way  to  know 
God  but  this  way  of  inner  love-experience. 
Only  a  son  can  know  a  Father.     Only  one 


Ch.  II]     KINGDOM  WITHIN  THE  SOUL    69 

who  has  trodden  the  wine-press  in  anguish 
and  pain,  and  through  it  all  has  felt  the 
enfolding  love  of  an  Abba-father  really 
knows.  Mysticism  has  its  pitfalls  and  its 
limitations,  but  this  much  is  sound  and 
true,  that  the  way  to  know  God  is  to  have 
inner  heart's  experience  of  Him,  like  the 
experience  of  the  Son. 


CHAPTER  III 
SOME  PROPHETS  OF  THE  INNER  WAY 


THE    psalmist's    WAY 

Emerson's  friend,  Margaret  Fuller, 
coined  the  phrase,  '^  standing  the  uni- 
verse." "I  can  stand  the  universe,"  was 
her  brave  statement.  But  long  before 
Concord  was  discovered  or  *'the  tran- 
scendental school"  was  dreamed  of  a  school 
of  Hebrew  saints  had  learned  how  to 
stand  the  universe. 

Canaan,  with  all  its  milk  and  honey, 
was  never  a  land  arranged  by  preestab- 
lished  harmony  as  a  paradise  for  the 
idealist.  It  enjoyed  no  special  millennium 
privileges.  Whatever  rainbow  dreams 
may  have  filled  the  mind  of  optimistic 
prophets  were  always  quickly  put  to 
flight  by  the  iron  facts  of  the  rigid  world 
70 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       71 

which  ringed  them  round.  The  Philis- 
tines were  pitiless  neighbors.  Like 
Gawain,  they  were  spiritually  too  blind 
even  to  have  desires  to  see.  Coats  of 
mail,  gigantic  spear  heads,  iron  chariots, 
and  Goliath  champions  were  their  argu- 
ments. How  could  a  nation  like  Israel 
be  free  to  work  out  its  spiritual  career 
with  these  crude  materialistic  Philistines 
always  hanging  on  its  borders  and  always 
threatening  its  national  existence  t  When 
the  Philistines  were  temporarily  quiet 
there  were  Moabites,  or  Edomites,  or 
Syrians  ready  to  take  a  turn  at  hamper- 
ing the  ideals  of  Israel.  And  worse  still 
was  ahead.  From  the  time  of  the  battle 
of  Karkar  (854  b.c.)  on,  the  armies  of 
Assyria  had  to  be  reckoned  with.  Here 
was  another  pitiless  foe  ;  efficient,  militant, 
inventive,  with  a  culture  and  religion 
suited  to  its  genius,  but  as  ruthless  as  a 
wolf  toward  everything  in  its  path.  It 
smashed  whatever  it  struck  and  in  the 
course  of  events  Jerusalem  was  ground 
in  its  irresistible  mill. 


72  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

When  a  "return"  was  granted  under  the 
Persians,  and  the  national  and  religious 
life  was  restored  in  Jerusalem,  new  diffi- 
culties swarmed.  During  the  long  period 
of  "restoration"  the  half-breed  peoples 
in  Palestine  with  their  low  ideals  threat- 
ened to  defeat  the  hopes  of  the  returned 
exiles  and  made  their  feeble  beginnings  as 
difficult  as  possible.  Then,  again,  the 
new  nation  was  hardly  firm  in  its  re- 
found  life  when  it  had  to  meet  the  forces 
of  Hellenism  which  rose  out  of  the  ex- 
pansion policies  of  Alexander.  A  culture 
incompatible  with  the  ideals  and  passions 
of  the  Hebrews  broke  in  and  surrounded 
them.  It  was  a  different  enemy  to  any 
they  had  yet  met  but  no  less  irreconcilable. 
Under  the  Hellenized  kings  of  Antioch 
all  the  hopes  and  ideals  of  this  long- 
suffering  race  were  put  in  jeopardy,  and 
the  very  existence  of  the  chosen  nation 
was  in  desperate  peril  in  the  period  of 
the  Maccabean  struggle. 

But  through  all  these  centuries  of  war- 
fare   with    alien    peoples,  and    during    all 


Ch.  Ill]    PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       73 

these  hard  periods  of  strain  and  anguish, 
there  existed  a  school  of  saints  who  were 
learning  how  to  stand  the  universe  and 
who  were  teaching  the  world  a  way  of 
victory  even  in  the  midst  of  outward 
defeat.  Their  "way"  was  the  fortifica- 
tion of  the  soul,  the  construction  of  the 
interior  life ;  and  the  literature  which 
they  produced  has  proved  to  be  one  of 
the  most  precious  treasures  of  the  race. 
The  gold  dust  words  of  these  saints  are 
scattered  through  most  of  the  early  books 
of  Israel,  for  in  all  periods  the  poets  of 
this  race  were  mainly  busy  with  this 
central  problem  of  life,  the  problem  of 
standing  the  universe.  But  it  is  In  the 
collection  which  we  call  the  Psalms  that 
we  find  the  supreme  literature  of  this 
Inner  way  of  fortification  and  victory. 

"Thou  restorest  my  soul,"  Is  the  joyous 
testimony  of  one  of  these  saints,  and  this 
testimony  of  the  best  loved  member  of 
this  school  of  saints  Is  the  key  to  the 
Psalmist's  way  of  triumph  In  general. 
In  the  confusion  of  events  and  the  Irra- 


74  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

tionality  of  things  —  die  Ohnmacht  der 
Natur  —  he  felt  his  way  back,  like  a 
little  child  in  the  dark  feeling  for  his 
mother,  until  he  found  God  as  the  rock 
on  which  his  feet  could  stand.  The 
processes  of  reconstruction  are  never 
traced  out.  The  logic  of  this  way  back 
to  the  fortification  of  the  soul  through 
the  discovery  of  God  is  not  given  in  detail. 
The  moments  when  we  shift  the  levels  of 
life  are  never  quite  describable.  But 
somehow  when  the  way  outside  goes  on 
into  the  valley  of  the  shadow  of  death, 
and  the  table  is  set  in  the  face  of  enemies, 
the  soul  falls  back  upon  God  and  is  re- 
stored. 

"I  could  not  understand,"  another 
Psalmist  declares.  Everything  was  baf- 
fling. The  wicked  seemed  to  prosper  and 
the  righteous  to  suffer.  The  world  ap- 
peared out  of  joint  and  the  whole  web  of 
life  hopelessly  tangled;  "but,"  he  adds 
with  no  further  explanation,  "I  came  into 
the  sanctuary  of  God  and  then  I  saw." 
It  is  like  the  final  solution  in  the  great 


Ch.  Ill]    PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       75 

inner  drama  of  Job.  God  answers  and 
Job's  problem  is  solved:  "I  had  heard 
of  thee  by  the  hearing  of  the  ear,  but 
now  mine  eye  seeth  thee."  In  the  great 
phrase  of  the  book,  ^^God  turned  the  cap- 
tivity of  Job." 

These  men  who  gave  us  our  Psalms 
had  learned  how  to  bear  adversity  and 
afHiction  without  being  overwhelmed  or 
defeated.  "All  thy  waves  and  thy  billows 
have  gone  over  me,"  one  of  them  cries. 
He  has  lost  his  land  and  has  only  the 
memory  of  Jordan  and  Hermon  and  Mizar. 
His  adversaries  are  a  constant  "sword  in 
his  bones."  They  jeer  at  him  and  ask, 
"Where  now  is  thy  God?"  but  his  trust 
holds  steadily  on :  "The  Lord  will  com- 
mand His  loving-kindness  in  the  daytime, 
and  in  the  night  His  song  shall  be  with 
me!"  Even  when  the  water-spouts  of 
trouble  break  over  him,  when  "the  waters 
roar  and  are  troubled,"  when  the  "na- 
tions rage  and  kingdoms  are  moved," 
when  "desolations  are  abroad  in  the 
earth,"    God    abides    for    him    "a    very 


76  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

present  help  in  time  of  trouble,"  "a 
refuge  and  strength"  for  his  soul.  Dis- 
may and  trembling  may  be  abroad ; 
pain  may  come  as  on  a  woman  in  travail, 
yet  this  deep  soul  can  calmly  say,  "God 
is  our  God  forever ;  He  will  be  our  guide 
even  unto  death." 

This  element  of  trust  and  confidence 
has  never  anywhere  had  grander  utter- 
ance. The  Psalmist  has  got  beyond  re- 
liance on  "horses  and  chariots,"  beyond 
trust  in  "riches,"  "princes,"  in  "the  bow 
or  the  sword,"  or  in  "man,  whose  breath 
is  in  his  nostrils."  He  rests  his  case  on 
God  alone,  and  builds  on  naked  faith  in 
His  goodness  and  care :  "  Thou  hast  de- 
livered my  soul  from  death,  mine  eyes 
from  tears,  and  my  feet  from  falling." 
Puzzled  he  often  is  with  the  prosperity 
of  the  wicked,  who  "flourish  like  green 
bay-trees";  perplexed  he  sometimes  is 
with  God's  delay  in  coming  to  the  help 
of  the  poor  and  needy  and  oppressed ; 
but  his  faith  holds  on  and  he  does  not 
"slide."     It  gives   us   almost   a   sense   of 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       77 

awe  as  we  see  a  valiant  soul,  hard  pressed, 
hemmed  around,  deep  in  affliction  and 
sorrow,  "standing  the  world"  and  saying 
in  clear  voice  :  "Oh,  give  thanks  unto  the 
Lord,  for  He  is  good ;  His  loving-kindness 
endureth  forever!" 

We  understand  when  we  read  such  words 
why  this  collection  of  Psalms  has  held  its 
place  in  the  religious  life  of  the  world. 
It  contains  the  living,  throbbing  expe- 
rience of  great  souls,  who  cared  absolutely 
for  one  thing  —  to  find  God  and  to  enjoy 
Him,  and  who,  having  found  their  one 
precious  jewel,  could  do  without  all  else, 
and  by  this  inner  experience  could  stand 

the  world. 

II 

THE    NEW    AND    LIVING   WAY 

The  writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
declares  that  Christ  has  introduced  into 
the  world  "a  new  and  living  way"  to  God. 
The  concrete  problems  confronting  this 
writer  to  a  Jewish  circle  of  the  first  cen- 
tury were  very  different  from  our  own 
problems  to-day,  but  he   so  succeeded  in 


78  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

seizing  an  eternal  aspect  of  the  issue 
that  his  word  about  the  new  and  living 
way  is  as  vital  now  as  it  was  then. 

His  "new  and  living  way,"  as  the  tenth 
chapter  shows,  is  the  way  of  personal 
consecration  as  a  substitute  for  the  old 
way  of  sacrifice.  The  manner  of  his  ex- 
position may  seem  to  us  now  a  little 
artificial,  but  there  can  be  no  question 
of  the  religious  significance  of  the  con- 
clusion. Following  his  usual  line  of  in- 
terpretation, he  begins  by  treating  the 
great  national  system  of  sacrifices  as  a 
"shadow,"  i.e.  a  parable,  or  a  figure,  or  a 
symbol,  of  a  true  and  higher  reality. 
Then  he  goes  on  boldly  to  declare  that 
"sacrifices"  have  become  empty  perform- 
ances —  it  is  impossible,  he  says,  that  the 
blood  of  bulls  and  goats  works  any  real 
change  in  the  nature  or  the  attitude  of 
the  soul.  Next  he  buttresses  his  radical 
conclusion  with  a  citation  of  Scripture 
to  the  effect  that  God  has  never  taken 
pleasure  in  burnt  offerings  and  ritual 
sacrifices,  and  on  this  Scripture  text  from 


Ch.  Ill]    PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       79 

the  Psalms  he  rises  to  his  new  insight, 
that  Christ  has  come  not  to  do  the  sacri- 
ficial work  of  a  priest,  not  to  satisfy 
God  by  a  sacrifice,  but  to  reveal  the 
personal  power  of  a  life  of  consecration  : 
"Then  said  I,  lo,  I  come  to  do  thy  will,  0 
God."  This  way  of  dedication  to  the 
divine  will,  this  complete  consecration  of 
self  out  of  love  for  the  will  of  God,  the 
writer  calls  "the  new  and  living  way." 

Two  very  important  conclusions  are 
inherently  bound  up  with  this  transition 
from  a  religion  of  sacrifices  to  a  religion  of 
dedication.  First,  it  carries  a  wholly 
new  conception  of  God  and  secondly,  it 
involves  a  complete  reinterpretation  of 
human  ministry.  If  God  does  not  take 
any  pleasure  in  sacrifice,  then  the  whole 
idea  that  He  is  a  Being  to  be  appeased 
by  gifts,  by  offerings,  by  incense,  by 
blood,  or  by  self-inflicted  suffering  of 
any  sort,  falls  to  the  ground.  These 
things  are  not  shadows  or  symbols ;  they 
are  blunders  and  mistakes.  The  God  for 
whom  they  are  intended  needs  and  asks 


8o  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

for  no  such  form  of  approach.  That  has 
always  been  the  contention  of  the  supreme 
prophets  of  the  race,  and  Christ  in  His 
unveiling  of  God  has  made  the  fact  sun- 
clear  that  God  is  not  rightly  conceived 
when  He  is  thought  of  as  needing  any 
kind  of  sacrifice  or  any  inducement  to 
make  Him  forgiving  or  loving.  Love  is 
His  nature.  The  new  and  living  way 
leads  first  of  all  to  this  new  revelation  of 
God. 

But  no  less  certainly  it  leads  to  a  new 
type  of  minister.  The  priest  was  con- 
ceived as  an  expert  in  ways  of  satisfying 
God  and  of  appeasing  Him.  He  was 
supposed  to  know  what  God  required 
and  how  to  perform  the  things  required. 
He  was  indispensable,  because  only  an 
expert,  duly  ordained,  could  do  the  work 
that  was  necessary  for  bringing  God  and 
man  into  relation  with  each  other.  Under 
*'the  new  and  living  way,"  however,  the 
priest  has  lost  his  occupation  and  the 
minister  becomes  an  expert  in  ways  of 
expanding    human    life    and    in    bringing 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       8 1 

men  to  a  dedication  of  themselves  to  the 
will  of  God  and  to  the  spiritual  tasks  of 
the  world.  In  accordance  with  this  new 
insight,  everything  that  concerns  religion 
must  in  some  way  attach  to  life.  It 
must  promote,  or  advance  life,  increase 
life,  add  to  its  height  and  depth,  or,  in 
some  manner,  make  life  richer  and  more 
joyous.  The  minister  of  the  new  and 
living  way  may  be  called,  as  he  no  doubt 
will  be  called,  to  make  many  sacrifices 
of  things  that  are  precious,  and  surrenders 
of  things  as  dear  as  life  itself,  but  there 
will  be  no  inherent  magic  in  these  sacri- 
fices. They  will  not  be  efficacious  as  a 
satisfaction  to  God.  They  will  be  only 
means  toward  some  larger  end  of  life, 
as  was  the  case  with  Christ's  surrenders 
and  sacrifices.  The  ascetic  temper  will 
be  left  forever  behind.  Whatever  is  cut 
off,  or  plucked  out,  will  be  removed  only 
for  the  sake  of  increasing  the  quality 
of  life  and  the  dynamic  of  it.  The  final 
test  is  always  to  be  sought  in  the  expansion 
of  capacity,  in  the  increase  of  talents,  in 


82  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

the  formation  of  personality,  in  dedica- 
tion to  the  task  of  widening  the  area  of 
life. 

The  true  minister  will,  like  the  great 
apostle,  present  his  body,  his  entire  being, 
in  living  dedication.  He  will  be  satisfied 
with  nothing  short  of  a  holy  and  acceptable 
service  —  acceptable,  because  Christlike 
—  he  will  endeavor  to  make  all  his  service 
"reasonable  service";  that  is,  intelligent 
service,  and  he  will  strive  earnestly  not 
to  become  set  into  the  mold  of  the  world 
or  into  any  deadening  groove  of  habit, 
but  to  be  transformed  by  a  steady  in- 
crease of  life  and  a  renewing  of  spiritual 
insight,  so  that  he  can  prove  what  is  the 
perfect  will  of  God  and  so  that  he  can 
minister  to  the  growing  life  of  the  world. 

Ill 

AN    APOSTLE    OF    THE    INNER   WAY 

It  is  always  a  foolish  blunder  to  take 
half  when  it  is  just  as  easy  to  have  a 
whole,  but  the  tendency  to  dichotomize 
all    realities    into    halves    and    to    assume 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       83 

that  we  are  shut  up  to  an  either-or  selec- 
tion, is  an  ancient  tendency  and  one  that 
very  often  keeps  us  from  winning  the  full 
richness  of  the  life  that  is  possible  for  us. 
Human  history  is  strewn  with  dualistic 
formulations  which  have  sorted  men  into 
either-or  groups.  Now  it  is  "spirit"  and 
"flesh"  that  are  sharply  antagonistic 
and  men  are  called  upon  to  settle  which 
of  these  two  halves  of  man's  life  is  to  have 
their  loyalty.  Again,  it  is  "this  world" 
and  "the  next  world"  —  the  here  and  the 
yonder  —  that  bid  for  our  heart's  suffrage. 
"The  Church"  and  "the  world"  ;  "faith" 
and  "reason";  "the  sacred"  and  "the 
secular"  are  other  twin  pairs  that  call  for 
a  sharp  decision  of  allegiance.  So,  too,  it 
has  been  customary  to  cut  apart  the 
outer  life  and  the  inner  life  and,  with  a 
stern  either-or,  to  put  them  into  rivalry 
with  one  another.  One  camp  insists  that 
religion  is  to  be  sought  in  deeds  and 
effects ;  the  other  camp  asserts  that 
religion  is  an  inward  condition  of  life  — 
to  he  is  more  important  than  to  do.     But 


84  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

this  method  of  cutting  is  like  that  which 
the  unnatural  mother  asked  Solomon  to 
perform  upon  the  living  child.  It  sunders 
what  was  alive  and  throbbing  into  two 
dead  fragments,  neither  of  which  is  a  real 
half  of  the  united  living  whole.  In  place 
of  all  the  either-or  formulations  that  force 
a  choice  between  the  halves  of  great 
spiritual  realities  I  should  put  the  living 
and  undivided  whole.  Instead  of  select- 
ing either-or,  I  prefer  to  take  both.  There 
is  no  line  that  splits  the  outer  life  and 
the  inner  life  into  two  compartments. 
Nobody  can  do  without  being  and  nobody 
can  be  without  doing.  Personality  is  the 
most  complete  unity  in  the  universe  and 
it  binds  forever  into  an  indissoluble  and 
integral  whole  the  outer  and  the  inner, 
the  spirit  and  the  deed. 

But  at  the  same  time  it  is  interesting 
to  see  what  a  supremely  great  and  many- 
sided  soul  like  St.  Paul  has  to  say  of  the 
inwardness  and  interior  depth  of  religion. 
That  he  was  a  man  of  action  is  plain 
enough  to  be  seen  and  nobody  can  easily 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       85 

miss  his  clarion  call  to  arm  cap-a-pie  for 
the  positive,  moral  battles  of  life.  He 
was  ethical  in  the  noblest  sense  of  the 
word,  but  there  was  an  inner  core  of 
religious  experience  in  him  which  is  as 
unique  and  wonderful  as  is  his  athletic 
ethical  purpose  or  his  imperial  spirit  of 
moral  conquest. 

There  was  for  him  no  kind  of  "doing" 
which  could  ever  be  a  substitute  for  the 
spiritual  health  of  the  soul.  Nobody 
has  ever  lived  who  has  been  more  deeply 
concerned  than  was  St.  Paul  over  the 
primary  problem  of  life :  How  can  my 
soul  be  saved  .^  To  be  "saved"  for  him, 
however,  does  not  mean  to  be  rescued 
from  dire  torment  or  from  the  conse- 
quences which  follow  sin  and  dog  the 
sinner.  No  transaction  in  another  world 
can  accomplish  salvation  for  him ;  no 
mere  change  from  debit  to  credit  side 
in  the  heavenly  ledgers  can  make  him  a 
saved  man.  To  be  saved  for  St.  Paul 
is  to  become  a  new  kind  of  person,  with 
a  new  inner  nature,  a  new  dimension  of 


86  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

life,  a  new  joy  and  triumph  of  soul.  There 
is  a  certain  inner  feeling  here  which  sys- 
tematic theology  can  no  more  convey 
than  a  botanical  description  of  a  flower 
can  convey  what  the  poet  feels  in  the 
presence  of  the  flower  itself.  There  is  no 
lack  of  books  and  articles  which  spread 
before  us  St.  Paul's  doctrines  and  which 
tell  us  his  theory  —  his  gnosis  —  of  the 
plan  of  salvation.  The  trouble  with  all 
these  external  accounts  is  that  they  clank 
like  hollow  armor.  They  are  like  sound- 
ing brass  and  clanging  cymbals.  We 
miss  the  real  thing  that  matters  —  the 
inner  throbbing  heart  of  the  living  ex- 
perience. 

What  he  is  always  trying  to  tell  us  is 
that  a  new  "nature"  has  been  formed 
within  him,  a  new  spirit  has  come  to  birth 
in  his  inmost  self.  Once  he  was  weak, 
now  he  is  strong.  Once  he  was  per- 
manently defeated,  now  he  is  "led  in  a 
continual  triumph."  Once  he  was  at  the 
mercy  of  the  forces  of  blind  instinct  and 
habit  which  dragged  him  whither  he  would 


Ch.  Ill]    PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       87 

not,  now  he  feels  free  from  the  dominion 
of  sin  and  its  inherent  peril  to  the  soul. 
Once,  with  all  his  pride  of  pharisaism,  he 
was  an  alien  to  the  commonwealth  of 
God,  now  he  is  a  fellow  citizen  with  all 
the  inward  sense  of  loyalty  that  makes 
citizenship  real. 

He  traces  the  immense  transformation 
to  his  personal  discovery  of  a  mighty 
forgiving  love,  where  he  had  least  ex- 
pected to  find  it,  in  the  heart  of  God  — 
"We  are  more  than  conquerors  through 
Him  that  loved  us;"  "The  life  I  now 
live,  I  live  by  faith  in  the  Son  of  God 
who  loved  me  and  gave  Himself  for  me." 
Faith,  wherever  St.  Paul  uses  it  to  ex- 
press the  central  human  fact  of  the  re- 
ligious life,  is  a  word  of  tremendous 
inward  depth.  It  is  bathed  and  satu- 
rated with  personal  experience,  and  it 
proves  to  be  a  constructive  life-principle 
of  the  first  importance.  Faith  works; 
it  is  something  by  which  one  lives  :  "The 
life  I  now  live,  I  live  by  faith." 

But  the  full  measure  —  the  length  and 


88  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

breadth,  depth  and  height  —  of  his  new 
inner  world  does  not  come  full  into  view 
until  one  sees  how  through  faith  and  love 
this  man  has  come  into  conscious  relation 
with  the  Spirit  of  God  inwardly  revealed 
to  him,  and  operative  as  a  resident  pres- 
ence in  his  own  spirit.  No  forensic  ac- 
count of  salvation  can  reach  this  central 
feature  of  real  salvation,  which  now  ap- 
pears as  new  inward  life  and  power. 
St.  Paul  takes  religion  out  of  the  sphere 
of  logic  into  the  primary  region  of  life. 
There  are  ways  of  living  upon  the  Life  of 
God  as  direct  and  verifiable  as  is  the 
correspondence  between  the  plant  and 
its  natural  environment.  To  live^  in  the 
full  spiritual  meaning  of  this  word  as 
St.  Paul  uses  it,  is  to  be  immersed  in  the 
living  currents  of  the  circulating  Life  of 
God,  and  to  be  fed  from  within  by  those 
sources  of  creative  Life  which  feed  the 
evolving  world:  "Beholding  as  in  a 
mirror  the  glory  of  the  Lord,  we  are 
transformed  into  the  same  image  by  the 
Spirit    of    the    Lord;"     "He    hath    sent 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       89 

forth  the  Spirit  of  His  Son  into  our  hearts, 
crying  Abba;"  "The  Spirit  bears  witness 
with  our  spirit  that  we  are  sons  of  God." 
With  the  progress  of  his  experience  and 
the  maturing  of  his  thought  upon  it, 
there  came  to  St.  Paul  an  extraordinary 
insight.  He  came  to  identify  Christ  with 
the  Spirit :  "The  Lord  is  the  Spirit." 
He  no  longer  thought  of  Him  as  merely 
the  historical  person  of  Galilee,  but  rather 
as  the  eternal  revelation  of  God,  first  in 
a  definite  form  as  Jesus  the  Christ,  and 
then,  after  the  resurrection,  as  Christ  the 
invisible  Spirit,  working  within  men,  re- 
creating and  renewing  their  spiritual  lives. 
The  influence  of  Christ  for  salvation  was, 
thus,  with  him  far  more  than  a  moral 
influence.  It  was  of  the  nature  of  a  real 
energism  —  a  spiritual  power  cooperating 
with  the  human  will  and  remaking  men 
by  the  formation  of  a  new  Christ-natured 
self  within  him.  The  process  has  no 
known  or  conceivable  limits.  Its  goal 
is  the  formation  of  a  man  "after  Christ"  : 
"Till  Christ  be  formed  in  you."     "That 


90  THE   INNER   LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

you  may  grow  up  into  Him  in  all  things 
who  is  the  Head;"  "Till  we  all  come 
to  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the  ful- 
ness of  Christ."  The  "fruit"  of  the 
Spirit,  matured  in  the  inward  realm  of 
man's  central  being  and  expressed  in 
common  acts  of  daily  life,  is  love,  joy, 
peace,  long-suffering,  kindness,  goodness, 
faithfulness,  meekness,  self-control  —  a  na- 
ture in  all  things  like  that  which  was  re- 
vealed in  glory  and  fulness  in  the  face  of 

Jesus  Christ. 

IV 

THE    EPHESIAN    GOSPEL 

In  his  fresh,  impressive  book,  The 
Ephesian  Gospel^  Dr.  Percy  Gardner  says 
that  in  the  early  period  of  Christianity 
no  city,  save  only  Jerusalem,  was  more 
influential  for  the  development  of  Chris- 
tian thought  than  was  the  city  of  Ephesus. 
It  was  here  in  Ephesus,  scholars  are  con- 
vinced, some  time  about  the  end  of  the 
first  century,  that  the  life  and  message  of 
Jesus  received  its  most  sublime  and  won- 
derful interpretation,  and  it  was  through 


Ch.  Ill]    PROPHETS  OF   INNER  WAY       91 

this  Ephesian  interpretation  that  the 
gathered  mysticism  of  Greece  and  the 
other  ancient  rehgions  of  the  world  was 
indissolubly  fused  with  the  great  ethical 
teachings  of  the  Galilean. 

It  will  never  be  known,  with  absolute 
certainty,  who  was  the  profound  genius 
that  made  this  Ephesian  interpretation, 
but  it  will  always  continue  to  be  called 
the  gospel  "according  to  John."  There 
will  never  be  any  doubt,  in  the  minds  of 
those  who  read  appreciatively,  that,  either 
inwardly  or  outwardly,  the  writer  of  it 
had  "lain  on  Christ's  bosom";  that  he 
had  "received  of  His  fulness,"  and  that 
he  had  "seen  with  his  eyes,  and  heard 
with  his  ears  and  handled  with  his  hands 
the  Word  of  Life."  He  was,  we  can 
almost  certainly  say,  one  of  St.  Paul's 
men.  He  has  fully  grasped  the  central 
ideas  of  the  apostle  who  first  planted  the 
truth  in  Ephesus,  and  he  carries  out  in 
powerful  fashion  the  Pauline  discovery 
that  Christ  has  become  an  invisible,  eternal 
presence  in  the  world.     At  the  same  time 


92  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

he  possesses,  either  at  first  or  second  hand, 
a  large  amount  of  narrative  material  for 
the  expansion  of  the  simple  gospel  story 
as  it  had  come  from  the  three  synoptic 
writers.  But  from  first  to  last  everything 
in  this  gospel  is  told  for  a  definite  pur- 
pose and  every  incident  is  loaded  with  a 
spiritual,  interpretative  content  and  mean- 
ing. He  does  not  undervalue  history  or 
the  details  of  the  Life  lived  in  Judea  and 
Galilee,  but  he  is  concerned  at  every  point 
to  raise  men's  thoughts  to  the  eternal 
meaning  of  Christ's  coming,  to  cultivate 
inward  fellowship  with  Him,  and  to  reveal 
the  last  great  beatitude,  that  those  who 
have  not  seen  with  outward  eyes,  but 
nevertheless  have  believed,  are  the  truly 
blessed  ones. 

The  earliest  of  our  gospel  documents 
—  the  document  now  called  Q  —  centers 
upon  the  "message,"  and  gives  us  a  col- 
lection of  simple  but  bottomlessly  pro- 
found sayings  of  Jesus.  Another  docu- 
ment —  the  gospel  of  Mark  —  hardly  less 
primitive  and    no   less  wonderful,  focuses 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       93 

upon  the  person  of  Jesus  and  His  doings. 
Here  we  have  in  very  narrow  compass  the 
earliest  story  of  this  Life,  inexhaustible  in 
its  depth  of  love  and  grace,  which  has 
ever  since  woven  itself  into  the  very  tissue 
of  human  life  and  thought.  But  now  this 
final  document,  which  we  have  been  call- 
ing "the  Ephesian  Gospel,"  makes  a 
unique  contribution  and  carries  us  up  to 
a  new  level  of  life.  It  announces  that 
Jesus  who  gave  the  message,  the  Jesus 
who  lived  this  extraordinary  personal  life 
and  did  the  deeds  of  love  and  sacrifice, 
has  become  an  ever-living,  environing, 
permeative  Spirit,  continuing  His  revela- 
tion, reliving  His  life,  extending  His  sway 
In  men  of  faith.  He  is  no  longer  of  one 
date  and  one  locality,  but  is  present  to 
open,  responsive  human  hearts  everywhere 
as  the  atmosphere  is  present  to  breathing 
lungs,  or  the  sea  to  swimming  fish,  or  the 
sunlight  to  growing  plants.  We  can  no 
more  lose  this  Christ  of  experience  than 
we  can  lose  the  sky. 

Christianity    is    in    this    interpretation 


94  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

vastly  more  than  an  historical  religion, 
bound  up  forever  with  the  incidents  of 
its  temporal  origin.  It  is  as  much  a 
present  fact  and  a  present  power  as  elec- 
tricity is.  It  is  rooted  in  an  inexhaustible 
source  of  Life.  It  is  as  dynamic  as  the 
central  springs  of  the  universe,  and  it  is 
perpetually  supplied  from  within  by  in- 
visible fountains  of  living  energy.  But 
this  triumphant  and  eternal  principle  of 
the  spiritual  life  is,  "according  to  John," 
no  vague,  abstract  principle  of  logic,  but 
instead  a  warm,  tender,  intimate,  con- 
crete personification  of  Life,  Light,  and 
Love  who  has  definitely  incarnated  the 
Truth  and  revealed  the  nature  of  God  and 
the  possible  glory  of  man. 

The  great  Ephesian  makes  no  division 
between  history  and  experience.  The 
Christ  of  his  faith  and  of  his  account  is 
alike  the  Christ  of  history  and  of  ex- 
perience. He  looks  backward,  and  he 
looks  inward,  and  the  Christ  of  his  story 
is  the  seamless  and  invisible  product  of 
this    double    process.     This    is    wholly    in 


Ch.  Ill]     PROPHETS  OF  INNER  WAY       95 

the  manner  of  the  great  apostle  who  de- 
clared "if  we  have  known  Christ  after  the 
flesh  we  know  Him  so  now  no  more," 
and  yet  neither  the  Ephesian  disciple  nor 
the  apostolic  master  discounted  the  im- 
portance of  the  facts  of  the  Christ  after 
the  flesh.  The  transcendent  truth  for 
them  both  is  the  truth  that  the  Church 
still  has  its  Christ,  who  is  leading  it  into 
all  the  truth  and  progressively  revealing 
Himself  with  the  expanding  ages. 

Every  Christian  mystic  for  nineteen 
hundred  years  has  felt  the  influence  of 
this  great  Ephesian  prophet,  and  his 
message  has  become  a  part  of  the  neces- 
sary air  we  breathe.  His  gospel  and  his 
brief  epistle,  loaded  with  its  message  of 
love,  are,  as  Deissmann  has  well  said, 
the  greatest  monument  of  the  appre- 
ciation of  the  mystical  teaching  of  St. 
Paul  that  has  ever  been  reared  in  the 
world.  The  man  who  performed  this 
immense  literary  task  for  us  of  the  after 
ages  now 

"Lies  as  he  lay  once,  breast  to  breast  with  God," 


96  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  Ill 

but  his  word  is  still  quick  and  powerful 
and  he  has  helped  us  more  than  any  other 
writer  has  done  to  interpret  our  own 
experience,  and  more  than  any  other 
prophet  this  Ephesian  has  inspired  our 
faith  in  the  real  presence  and  has  given 
us  the  assurance,  inwardly  verified,  that 
we  are  not  comfortless  and  alone,  in  a 
world  of  pain  and  loss  and  death,  but  are 
bound  as  living  twigs  in  one  sap-giving 
Vine  of  Life,  participants  of  the  vitalizing, 
refreshing,  joy-bringing  bread  and  water 
of  Life,  and  with  open  access  to  the  infinite 
healing  and  comfort  and  fortification  of 
the  Eternal  Christ. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE 
I 

WAITING    ON    GOD 

As  worship,  taken  in  its  highest  sense 
and  widest  scope,  is  man's  loftiest  under- 
taking, we  cannot  too  often  return  to 
the  perennial  questions :  What  is  wor- 
ship ?  Why  do  we  worship  ?  How  do 
we  best  perform  this  supreme  human 
function  ?  Worship  is  too  great  an  ex- 
perience to  be  defined  in  any  sharp  or 
rigid  or  exclusive  fashion.  The  history 
of  religion  through  the  ages  reveals  the 
fact  that  there  have  been  multitudinous 
ways  of  worshiping  God,  all  of  them 
yielding  real  returns  of  life  and  joy  and 
power  to  large  groups  of  men.  At  its 
best  and  truest,  however,  worship  seems 
to  me  to  be  direct,  vital,  joyous,  personal 

H  97 


98  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

experience  and  practice  of  the  presence  oj 
God. 

The  very  fact  that  such  a  mighty  ex- 
perience as  this  is  possible  means  that 
there  is  some  inner  meeting  place  between 
the  soul  and  God ;  in  other  words,  that 
the  divine  and  human,  God  and  man, 
are  not  wholly  sundered.  In  an  earlier 
time  God  was  conceived  as  remote  and 
transcendent.  He  dwelt  in  the  citadel  of 
the  sky,  was  worshiped  with  ascending 
incense  and  communicated  His  will  to 
beings  beneath  through  celestial  messen- 
gers or  by  mysterious  oracles.  We  have 
now  more  ground  than  ever  before  for 
conceiving  God  as  transcendent ;  that  is, 
as  above  and  beyond  any  revelation  of 
Himself,  and  as  more  than  any  finite 
experience  can  apprehend.  But  at  the 
same  time,  our  experience  and  our  ever- 
growing knowledge  of  the  outer  and 
inner  universe  confirm  our  faith  that 
God  is  also  immanent,  a  real  presence,  a 
spiritual  reality.  Immediately  to  be  felt 
and    known,    a   vital,    life-giving   environ- 


Ch.  IV]     THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      99 

ment  of  the  soul.  He  is  a  Being  who  can 
pour  His  life  and  energy  Into  human 
souls,  even  as  the  sun  can  flood  the  world 
with  light  and  resident  forces,  or  as  the 
sea  can  send  its  refreshing  tides  into  all 
the  bays  and  inlets  of  the  coast,  or  as  the 
atmosphere  can  pour  its  life-giving  sup- 
plies into  the  fountains  of  the  blood  in 
the  meeting  place  of  the  lungs ;  or,  better 
still,  as  the  mother  fuses  her  spirit  into 
the  spirit  of  her  responsive  child,  and 
lays  her  mind  on  him  until  he  believes  in 
her  belief. 

It  will  be  impossible  for  some  of  us 
ever  to  lose  our  faith  in,  our  certainty  of, 
this  vital  presence  which  overarches  our 
inner  lives  as  surely  as  the  sky  does  our 
outer  lives.  The  more  we  know  of  the 
great  unveiling  of  God  in  Christ,  the 
more  we  see  that  He  is  a  Being  who  can 
be  thus  revealed  in  a  personal  life  that 
is  parallel  in  will  with  Him  and  perfectly 
responsive  in  heart  and  mind  to  the 
spiritual  presence.  We  can  use  as  our 
own    the    inscription   on    the   wall    of   the 


lOO  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

ancient  temple  in  Egypt.  On  one  of 
the  walls  a  priest  of  the  old  religion  had 
written  for  his  divinity:  "I  am  He  who 
was  and  is  and  ever  shall  be,  and  my 
veil  hath  no  man  lifted."  On  the  op- 
posite wall,  some  one  who  had  found  his 
way  into  the  later,  richer  faith,  wrote 
this  inscription:  "Veil  after  veil  have 
we  lifted  and  ever  the  Face  is  more  won- 
derful!" 

It  must  be  held,  I  think,  as  Emerson 
so  well  puts  it,  that  there  is  "no  bar  or 
wall  in  the  soul"  separating  God  and  man. 
We  lie  open  on  one  side  of  our  nature  to 
God,  who  is  the  Oversoul  of  our  souls, 
the  Overmind  of  our  minds,  the  Over- 
person  of  our  personal  selves.  There  are 
deeps  in  our  consciousness  which  no 
private  plumb  line  of  our  own  can  sound ; 
there  are  heights  in  our  moral  conscience 
which  no  ladder  of  our  human  intelligence 
can  scale;  there  are  spiritual  hungers, 
longings,  yearnings,  passions,  which  find 
no  explanation  in  terms  of  our  physical 
inheritance  or  of  our  outside  world.     We 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     loi 

touch  upon  the  coasts  of  a  deeper  uni- 
verse, not  yet  explored  or  mapped,  but 
no  less  real  and  certain  than  this  one  in 
which  our  mortal  senses  are  at  home. 
We  cannot  explain  our  normal  selves  or 
account  for  the  best  things  we  know  — 
or  even  for  our  condemnation  of  our 
poorer,  lower  self  —  without  an  appeal 
to  and  acknowledgment  of  a  divine  Guest 
and  Companion  who  is  the  real  presence 
of  our  central  being.  How  shall  we  best 
come  into  conscious  fellowship  with  God 
and  turn  this  environing  presence  into  a 
positive  source  of  inner  power,  and  of 
energy  for  the  practical  tasks  and  duties 
of  daily  life  ? 

It  is  never  easy  to  tell  in  plain  words 
what  prepares  the  soul  for  intercourse 
with  God ;  what  it  is  that  produces  the 
consciousness  of  divine  tides,  the  joyous 
certainty  that  our  central  life  is  being 
flooded  and  bathed  by  celestial  currents. 
No  person  ever  quite  understands  how 
his  tongue  utters  its  loftiest  words,  how 
his   pen   writes   its   noblest   phrases,    how 


I02  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

his  clearest  insights  came  to  him,  how  his 
most  heroic  deeds  got  done,  or  how  the 
finest  strands  of  his  character  were  woven. 
Here  is  a  mystery  which  we  never  quite 
uncover  —  a  background  which  we  never 
wholly  explore  lies  along  the  fringes  of 
the  most  illumined  part  of  our  lives. 
This  mystery  surrounds  all  the  supreme 
acts  of  religion.  They  cannot  be  reduced 
to  a  cold  and  naked  rational  analysis. 
The  intellect  possesses  no  master  key 
which  unlocks  all  the  secrets  of  the  soul. 

We  can  say,  however,  that  purity  of 
heart  is  one  of  the  most  essential  pre- 
conditions for  this  high-tide  experience  of 
worship.  That  means,  of  course,  much 
more  than  absence  of  moral  impurity, 
freedom  from  soilure  and  stain  of  willful 
sins.  It  means,  besides,  a  cleansing  away 
of  prejudice  and  harsh  judgment.  It 
means  sincerity  of  soul,  a  believing,  trust- 
ing, loving  spirit.  It  means  intensity  of 
desire  for  God,  singleness  of  purpose, 
integrity  of  heart.  The  flabby  nature, 
the   duplex   will,    the  judging   spirit,   will 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF   EXPERIENCE      103 

hardly  succeed  in  worshiping  God  in 
any  great  or  transforming  way. 

Silence  is,  again,  a  very  important 
condition  for  the  great  inner  action  which 
we  call  worship.  So  long  as  we  are  con- 
tent to  speak  our  own  patois^  to  live  in 
the  din  of  our  narrow,  private  affairs, 
and  to  tune  our  minds  to  stock  broker's 
tickers,  we  shall  not  arrive  at  the  lofty 
goal  of  the  soul's  quest.  We  shall  hear 
the  noises  of  our  outer  universe  and 
nothing  more.  When  we  learn  how  to 
center  down  into  the  stillness  and  quiet, 
to  listen  with  our  souls  for  the  whisper- 
ings of  Life  and  Truth,  to  bring  all  our 
inner  powers  into  parallelism  with  the 
set  of  divine  currents,  we  shall  hear  tid- 
ings from  the  inner  world  at  the  heart 
and  center  of  which  is  God. 

But  by  far  the  most  influential  con- 
dition for  effective  worship  is  group- 
silence  —  the  waiting,  seeking,  expectant 
attitude  permeating  and  penetrating  a 
gathered  company  of  persons.  We  hardly 
know   in   what   the    group-influence    con- 


I04  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

sists,  or  why  the  presence  of  others  height- 
ens the  sensitive,  responsive  quality  in 
each  soul,  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  of 
the  fact.  There  is  some  subtle  telepathy 
that  comes  into  play  in  the  living  silence 
of  a  congregation  which  makes  every 
earnest  seeker  more  quick  to  feel  the 
presence  of  God,  more  acute  of  inner 
ear,  more  tender  of  heart  to  feel  the 
bubbling  of  the  springs  of  life  than  any 
one  of  them  would  be  in  isolation.  Some- 
how we  are  able  to  "lend  our  minds  out," 
as  Browning  puts  it,  or  at  least  to  con- 
tribute toward  the  formation  of  an  at- 
mosphere that  favors  communion  and  co- 
operation with  God. 

If  this  is  so,  if  each  assists  all  and  all  in 
turn  assist  each,  our  responsibilities  in 
meetings  for  worship  are  very  real  and 
very  great  and  we  must  try  to  realize 
that  there  is  a  form  of  ministry  which 
is  dynamic  even  when  the  lips  are  sealed. 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      105 
II 

IN    THE    SPIRIT 

There  has  surely  been  no  lack  of  dis- 
cussion on  the  Trinity  during  the  cen- 
turies of  Christian  history !  But  in  all 
the  welter  and  turmoil  of  words  there 
has  been  surprisingly  little  said  about  the 
Spirit.  The  nature  of  the  Father  and 
the  Son  has  always  been  the  central 
theme,  and  whatever  is  said  of  the  Spirit 
is  vague  and  brief.  The  Creeds  are  very 
precise  in  their  accounts  of  God  the 
Father  and  of  Christ  the  Son,  but  of  the 
Spirit,  they  merely  say  without  explana- 
tion or  expansion:  "I  believe  in  the 
Holy  Spirit." 

The  mystics  and  the  heretics  have 
generally  had  more  to  say  of  the  Spirit. 
They  have  almost  always  claimed  for 
themselves  direct  and  inward  guidance ; 
they  have  insisted  that  God  is  near  at 
hand,  a  presence  to  be  felt,  and  they  have 
endeavored  to  bring  in  a  "dispensation" 
of  the  religion  of  the  Spirit.     But  they, 


I06  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

too,  have  contented  themselves  with  vague 
and  hazy  accounts  of  the  nature  and  opera- 
tion of  the  Spirit.  It  has  largely  remained 
a  subject  of  mystery,  a  kind  of  "fringe" 
with  no  definite  idea  corresponding  to  the 
word. 

One  reason  for  this  haze  and  vagueness 
is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  Spirit  has 
generally  been  supposed  to  act  suddenly, 
miraculously,  and  "as  He  lists,"  so  that 
no  law  or  principle  or  method  of  His 
operation  can  be  discovered.  He  has 
been  conceived  as  working  upon  or 
through  the  individual  in  such  a  way  that 
the  individual  is  merely  an  "instrument," 
receiving  and  transmitting  what  comes 
entirely  from  "beyond"  himself.  Con- 
sequently to  be  "in  the  Spirit"  has  meant 
to  be  "out  of  oneself,"  i.e.  to  be  a  channel 
for  something  that  has  had  no  origin  in, 
and  no  assistance  from,  our  own  personal 
consciousness.  As  Philo,  the  famous 
Alexandrian  teacher  of  the  first  century, 
states  this  view:  "Ideas  in  an  invisible 
manner  are  suddenly  showered  upon  me 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      107 

and  implanted  in  me  by  an  inspiration 
from  on  high." 

There  is  no  doubt  that  in  some  cases 
in  all  ages  men  and  women  have  had 
experiences  like  that  of  Philo's.  But 
they  are  by  no  means  universal ;  they 
are  extremely  rare  and  unusual.  God 
does  sometimes  "give  to  His  beloved  in 
sleep"  and  He  does  apparently  sometimes 
open  the  windows  of  the  soul  by  sudden 
inrushes  of  light  and  power.  It  is,  how- 
ever, a  grave  mistake  to  limit  the  sphere 
and  operation  of  the  divine  Spirit  to  these 
sudden,  unusual,  miraculous  incursions. 
It  is  precisely  that  mistake  —  made  by 
so  many  spiritual  persons  —  that  has  kept 
Christians  in  general  from  realizing  the 
immense  importance  of  the  work  of  the 
Spirit  in  everyday  religious  life.  The  mis- 
take is,  of  course,  due  to  our  persistent 
tendency  to  separate  the  divine  from  the 
human  as  two  independent  "realities," 
and  to  treat  the  divine  as  something 
"away,"  "above,"  and  "beyond." 

St.   Paul,   in  spite  of  all  his   rabbinical 


lo8  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

training  and  the  dualisms  of  his  age,  is 
still  the  supreme  exponent  of  the  genuine, 
as  opposed  to  the  false,  idea  of  the  Spirit. 
Whether  the  sermon  on  the  Areopagus  as 
given  in  Acts  is  an  exact  report  of  an 
actual  speech,  or  not,  the  words,  "in 
Him  we  live  and  move  and  are,"  express 
very  well  St.  Paul's  mature  conception 
of  the  all-pervasive  immanence  of  God, 
though  they  by  no  means  indicate  the 
extraordinary  richness  and  boldness  of 
his  thought.  He  identifies  Christ  and 
the  Spirit  —  "the  Lord  is  the  Spirit."^ 
The  resurrected  and  glorified  Christ,  he 
holds,  relives,  reincarnates  Himself,  in 
Christian  believers.  He  becomes  the  spirit 
and  life  of  their  lives.  He  makes  through 
them  a  new  body  for  Himself,  a  new  kind 
of  revelation  of  Himself.  They  them- 
selves are  "letters  of  Jesus  Christ," 
written  by  the  Spirit.  He  is  no  longer 
limited  to  one  locality  of  the  world  or  to 
one  epoch  of  time.  He  is  "present" 
wherever  two  or  three  believers  meet  in 

1  II  Corinthians  III.  17. 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      109 

loyalty  to  Him.  He  is  revealed  wherever 
any  of  His  faithful  followers  are  working 
in  love  and  devotion  to  extend  the  sway 
of  His  Kingdom.  The  Church,  which  for 
St.  Paul  means  always  the  fellowship  of 
believers,  living  in  and  through  the  Spirit, 
is  "a  growing  habitation  of  God." 

The  "sign"  of  the  Spirit's  presence  is, 
however,  no  sudden  miraculous  bestowal 
like  an  unknown  tongue  or  an  extraor- 
dinary gift  of  healing.  It  is  just  a  normal 
thing  like  the  manifestation  of  love.  It 
is  proved  by  the  increase  of  fellowship, 
the  growth  of  group-spirit,  the  spread  of 
community-loyalty.  When  love  has  come, 
the  Spirit  is  there,  and  when  love  comes, 
those  who  are  in  its  spirit  suffer  long  and 
are  kind ;  they  envy  not ;  they  are  not 
provoked ;  they  do  not  exalt  mistakes ; 
they  bear  all  things,  believe  all  things, 
hope  all  things,  endure  all  things.  Love 
constructs,  because  it  is  the  inherent 
evidence  of  the  Spirit,  living,  working, 
operating  in  the  persons  who  love. 
Through  them  the  incarnation  of  God  is 


no  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

continued  in  the  world,  the  Spirit  of 
Christ  finds  its  organ  of  expression  and 
life,  and  the  Kingdom  of  God  comes  on 
earth  as  it  is  in  heaven.  This  "body," 
this  Church,  this  community-group  of 
loyal  believers,  is  "the  completion  of 
Him  who  through  all  and  in  all  is  being 
fulfilled."  1 

If  this  Pauline  idea  of  the  Spirit  is  the 
true  idea  —  and  I  believe  it  is  —  then  we 
are  to  look  for  the  divine  presence,  the 
divine  guidance,  the  divine  inspiration, 
not  so  much  in  sudden  extraordinary 
inrushes  and  miraculous  bestowals,  as  in 
the  processes  which  transform  our  stub- 
born nature,  which  make  us  loyal  and 
loving,  which  bind  us  into  fellowship  with 
others,  which  form  in  us  community- 
spirit  and  sympathetic  cooperation,  and 
which  make  us  efficient  organs  of  the 
Christ-life  and  of  the  growing  Kingdom 
of  God. 


Ephesians  I.  23. 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     in 
III 

THE    POWER   OF    PRAYER 

It  seems  to  me  very  clear  that  there  is 
a  native,  elemental  homing  instinct  in 
our  souls  which  turns  us  to  God  as  natu- 
rally as  the  flower  turns  to  the  sun.  Ap- 
parently everybody  in  intense  moments 
of  human  need  reaches  out  for  some  great 
source  of  life  and  help  beyond  himself. 
That  is  one  reason  why  we  can  pray  and 
do  pray,  however  conditions  alter.  It  is 
further  clear  that  persons  who  pray  in 
living  faith,  in  some  way  unlock  reser- 
voirs of  energy  and  release  great  sources 
of  power  within  their  interior  depths. 
There  is  an  experimental  energy  in  prayer 
as  certainly  as  there  is  a  force  of  gravita- 
tion or  of  electricity.  In  a  recent  in- 
vestigation of  the  value  of  prayer,  nearly 
seventy  per  cent  of  the  persons  questioned 
declared  that  they  felt  the  presence  of  a 
higher  power  while  in  the  act  of  praying. 
As  one  of  these  personal  testimonies  puts 
it:     prayer    makes    it    possible    to    carry 


112  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

heavy  burdens  with  serenity;  it  produces 
an  atmosphere  of  spirit  which  triumphs 
over  difficulties. 

It  certainly  is  true  that  a  door  opens 
into  a  larger  life  and  a  new  dimension 
when  the  soul  flings  itself  out  in  real 
prayer,  and  incomes  of  power  are  ex- 
perienced which  heighten  all  capacities 
and  which  enable  the  recipient  to  with- 
stand temptation,  endure,  i:rial,  and  con- 
quer obstacles.  But  prayer  has  always 
meant  vastly  more  than  that  to  the  saints 
of  past  ages.  It  was  assuredly  to  them 
a  homing  instinct  and  it  was  the  occasion 
of  refreshed  and  quickened  life,  but, 
more  than  that,  it  meant  to  them  a  time 
of  intimate  personal  intercourse  and  fel- 
lowship with  a  divine  Companion.  It 
was  two-sided,  and  not  a  solitary  and 
one-sided  heightening  of  energy  and  of 
functions.  Nor  was  that  all.  To  the 
great  host  of  spiritual  and  triumphant 
souls  who  are  behind  us  prayer  was  an 
effective  and  operative  power.  It  accom- 
plished   results    and    wrought    effects    be- 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     113 

yond  the  range  of  the  inner  life  of  the 
person  who  was  praying.  It  was  a  way 
of  setting  vast  spiritual  currents  into  cir- 
culation which  worked  mightily  through 
the  world  and  upon  the  lives  of  men. 
It  was  believed  to  be  an  operation  of 
grace  by  which  the  fervent  human  will 
could  influence  the  course  of  divine  ac- 
tion in  the  secret  channels  of  the  uni- 
verse. 

Is  this  two-sided  and  objective  view  of 
prayer,  as  real  intercourse  and  as  efl^ective 
power,  still  tenable  ?  Can  men  who  ac- 
cept the  conclusions  of  science  still  pray 
in  living  faith  and  with  real  expectation 
of  results  ?  I  see  no  ground  against  an 
aflirmative  answer.  Science  has  furnished 
no  evidence  which  compels  us  to  give  up 
believing  in  the  reality  of  a  personal 
conscious  self  which  has  a  certain  area  of 
power  over  its  own  acts  and  its  own 
destiny,  and  which  is  capable  of  inter- 
course, fellowship,  friendship,  and  love 
with  other  personal  selves.  Science  has 
discovered   no   method   of  describing   this 


114  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

spiritual  reality,  which  we  call  a  self, 
nor  can  it  explain  what  its  ultimate  na- 
ture is,  or  how  it  creatively  acts  and 
reacts  in  love  and  fellowship  toward  other 
beings  like  itself.  This  lies  beyond  the 
sphere  and  purview  of  science. 

Science,  again,  has  furnished  no  evi- 
dence whatever  against  the  reality  of  a 
great  spiritual  universe,  at  the  heart  and 
center  of  which  is  a  living,  loving  Person 
who  is  capable  of  intercourse  and  fellow- 
ship and  friendship  and  love  with  finite 
spirits  like  us.  That  is  also  a  field  into 
which  science  has  no  entree ;  it  is  a  matter 
which  none  of  her  conclusions  touch.  Her 
business  is  to  tell  how  natural  phenomena 
act  and  what  their  unvarying  laws  are. 
She  has  nothing  to  say  and  can  have 
nothing  to  say  about  the  reality  of  a 
divine  Person  in  a  sphere  within  or  above 
or  beyond  the  phenomenal  realm,  i.e, 
the  realm  where  things  appear  in  the 
describable  terms  of  space  and  time  and 
causality. 

Real   and  convincing  intimations  have 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF   EXPERIENCE     115 

.broken  Into  our  world  that  there  actually 
is  a  spiritual  universe  and  a  divine  Per- 
son at  the  heart  and  center  of  it  who  is 
in  living  and  personal  correspondence  with 
us.  This  is  the  most  solid  substance,  the 
very  warp  and  woof,  of  Christ's  entire 
revelation.  The  universe  is  not  a  mere 
play  of  forces,  nor  limited  to  things  we 
see  and  touch  and  measure.  Above,  be- 
yond, within,  or  rather  in  a  way  transcend- 
ing all  words  of  space,  there  is  a  Father- 
God  who  is  Love  and  Life  and  Light  and 
Spirit,  and  who  is  as  open  of  access  to  us 
as  the  lungs  to  the  air.  Nothing  In  our 
world  of  space  disproves  the  truth  of 
Christ's  report.  Our  hearts  tell  us  that 
it  might  be  true,  that  it  ought  to  be  true, 
that  it  is  true.  And  if  It  Is  true,  prayer, 
in  all  the  senses  in  which  I  have  used  it, 
may  still  be  real  and  still  be  operative. 

There  is  no  doubt  a  region  where  events 
occur  under  the  play  of  descrlbable  forces, 
where  consequent  follows  antecedents  and 
where  law  and  causality  appear  rigid  and 
unvarying.     In  that  narrow,  limited  realm 


Ii6  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

of  space  particles  we  shall  perhaps  not 
expect  interruptions  or  interferences.  We 
shall  rather  learn  how  to  adjust  to  what 
is  there,  and  to  respect  it  as  the  highest 
will  of  the  deepest  nature  and  wisdom  of 
things.  But  in  the  realm  of  personal 
relationships,  in  all  that  touches  the 
hidden  springs  of  life,  in  the  stress  and 
strain  of  human  strivings,  in  the  inter- 
connections of  man  with  man,  and  group 
with  group,  in  the  vital  matters  by  which 
we  live  or  die,  in  the  weaving  of  personal 
and  national  issues  and  destinies,  we  may 
well  throw  ourselves  unperplexed  on  God, 
and  believe  implicitly  that  what  we  pray 
for  affects  the  heart  of  God  and  influences 
the  course  and  current  of  this  Deeper  Life 
that  makes  the  world. 

IV 

THE   MYSTERY   OF    GOODNESS 

We  generally  use  the  word  "  mystery  "  to 
indicate  the  dark,  baffling,  and  forbidding 
aspects  of  our  life-experience.  The  things 
which  spoil  our  peace  and  mar  our  har- 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     117 

monies  and  break  our  unions  are  for  us 
characteristically  mysteries.  Pain,  suffer- 
ing, and  death  are  the  most  ancient  of 
mysteries,  which  philosophers  and  poets 
have  always  been  striving  to  solve  and 
unravel.  Evil  in  all  its  complicated  forms 
and  sin  in  all  its  hideous  varieties  con- 
stitute another  group  of  these  dark  and 
forbidding  mysteries,  about  which  the 
race  has  forever  speculated.  The  prob- 
lem of  evil  has  been  the  prolific  source 
both  of  mythological  stories  and  of  sys- 
tems of  philosophy. 

Every  war  that  has  swept  the  world, 
from  that  of  Chedorlaomer  to  that  of 
Europe  to-day,  has  driven  this  mystery 
of  evil  into  the  foreground  of  conscious- 
ness, wherever  the  dark  trail  of  ruin  and 
devastation  and  myriad  woe  has  lain, 
or  lies,  across  the  lives  and  hearts  of  men. 
Now,  as  always,  burning  homes,  ruined 
business,  masses  of  slain,  maimed  bodies, 
the  welter  of  animal  instincts,  the  suffer- 
ing of  women  and  little  children,  and  the 
hates    enflamed   between    races    form   the 


Il8  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

greatest  summation  of  baffling  evils  that 
man  has  known. 

But  it  is  an  interesting  fact  that  the 
mysteries  referred  to  by  the  greatest 
prophets  of  the  soul  are  not  of  this  dark 
and  baffling  type.  They  are  mysteries 
of  light  rather  than  mysteries  of  darkness. 
Christ  speaks  of  "the  mystery  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God."  Saint  Paul  finds  the 
central  mystery  to  be  an  incarnational 
revelation  of  a  suffering,  loving  God, 
who  re-lives  His  life  in  us,  and  the  author 
of  the  Epistle  to  Timothy  announces 
"the  great  mystery  of  godliness ^  ^  Love 
is  put  above  all  mysteries ;  the  gospel  of 
grace  is  more  "unsearchable"  than  any 
suffering  of  this  present  time,  and  the 
real  mystery  is  to  be  found  rather  in 
resurrection  than  in  death:  "Behold  I 
show  you  a  mystery.  We  shall  not  all 
sleep,  but  we  shall  all  be  changed  and 
the  dead  shall  be  raised." 

^  It  is  true,  no  doubt,  that  the  word  "  mystery"  In  the 
New  Testament  is  generally  used  with  a  technical  mean- 
ing. I  shall  refer  later  to  the  true  significance  of  the  word, 
but  for  the  moment  it  is  not  overstraining  it  to  use  it  as  I 
have  done  in  the  text. 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     119 

Science  has  confirmed  this  emphasis  of 
the  spiritual  prophets.  We  come  back 
from  the  greatest  books  of  the  present 
time  with  the  same  conclusion  as  this 
of  the  New  Testament  that  the  prime 
mysteries  of  the  world  are  mysteries  of 
goodness  and  not  of  evil ;  of  light  and 
not  of  darkness.  We  can  pretty  easily 
understand  how  there  should  be  "evil" 
in  a  world  that  has  evolved  under  the 
two  great* biological  conditions  :  (i)  Every 
being  that  survives  wins  out  because  he 
is  more  physically  fit  than  his  neighbors 
in  the  struggle  for  existence,  and  (2)  there 
is  a  tendency  for  all  inherited  traits  to 
persist  in  offspring.  In  order  to  have 
"nature"  at  all,  there  must  be  a  heavy 
tinge  of  redness  in  tooth  and  claw.  The 
primitive  passions  must  be  strong  in 
order  to  insure  any  beings  that  can  sur- 
vive. And  if  there  is  to  be  inheritance 
of  parental  traits,  then  the  tendencies 
of  bygone  ages  are  bound  to  persist  on, 
even  into  a  world  of  more  highly  evolved 
beings,  and  there  will  be  inherited  "relics" 


I20  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

of  fears,  of  appetites,  of  impulses,  of  in- 
stincts, and  of  desires,  as  there  are  inherited 
"relics"  in  the  physical  structure,  and 
men  will  continue  to  do  things  which 
would  better  suit  the  animal  level.  And, 
finally,  if  the  world  is  to  be  made  by  evolv- 
ing processes,  there  will  of  necessity  be 
an  overlapping  of  "high"  and  "low." 
The  world  cannot  go  on  without  carrying 
its  past  along  with  the  advancing  line, 
so  that  in  the  light  of  the  new  and  better 
that  comes,  the  old  and  out-passed  seems 
"evil"  and  "bad." 

We  can  see  plainly  enough  where  the 
drive  of  selfishness  came  from,  where  the 
passionate  fears  and  angers  and  hates 
that  mar  our  world  got  into  the  system. 
What  is  not  so  clear  and  plain  is  how 
we  came  to  be  possessed  of  a  driving 
hunger  for  goodness,  how  we  ever  got  a 
bent  for  self-sacrifice,  how  we  derived 
our  disposition  for  love,  how  we  dis- 
covered that  it  is  more  blessed  to  give 
than  to  receive.  The  mystery  after  all 
is  the  mystery  of  goodness.     The  gradual 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     121 

growth  of  a  Kingdom  of  God,  in  which 
men  live  by  love  and  brotherhood,  in 
which  they  give  without  expecting  re- 
turns, in  which  they  decrease  that  others 
may  increase,  and  in  which  their  joy  is 
fulfilled  in  the  spreading  oi  joy  —  that  is, 
after  all,  the  mystery. 

The  coming,  into  this  checkerboard 
world,  of  One  who  practiced  love  in  all 
the  varying  issues  of  life, 

"Who  nailed  all  flesh  to  the  cross 
Till  self  died  out  in  the  love  of  his  kind," 

and  who  Himself  believed,  and  taught 
others  to  believe,  that  His  Life  was  a 
genuine  revelation  of  God  and  the  spirit- 
ual realm  of  reality  —  there  is  a  mystery. 
That  this  Life  which  was  in  Him  is  an 
actual  incursion  from  a  higher,  inexhaust- 
ible world  of  Spirit,  that  we  all  may  par- 
take of  it,  draw  upon  it,  live  in  it,  and 
have  it  live  in  us,  so  that  in  some  sense 
it  becomes  true  that  Christ  lives  in  us 
and  we  are  raised  from  the  dead  —  that 
is  the  mystery. 


122  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

This  word  *' mystery"  or  "mysteries" 
did  not,  however,  stand  in  the  thought  of 
the  early  Christians  for  something  myste- 
rious and  inscrutable.  It  stood  rather  for 
some  unspeakably  precious  reality  which 
could  be  known  only  by  initiation  and 
to  the  initiate.  The  "mysteries"  of 
Mithra  were  forever  hidden  to  those  on 
the  outside ;  to  those  who  formed  the 
inner  circle  the  secret  of  the  real  presence 
of  the  god  was  as  open  and  clear  as  the 
sunlight  under  the  sky.  So,  too,  with 
the  "mysteries"  of  the  gospel.  They 
could  not  be  conveyed  by  word  of  wis- 
dom or  by  proof  of  logic.  Then,  and 
always,  the  love  of  Christ  "passes  knowl- 
edge," "the  peace  of  God"  overtops 
processes  of  thought.  Love,  Grace,  Good- 
ness, Godliness,  Christlikeness  breaking 
forth  in  men  like  us,  remains  a  "mystery" 
—  a  thing  not  "explainable"  in  terms  of 
empirical  causation  and  not  capable  of 
being  "known"  except  to  those  who  see 
and  taste  and  touch,  because  they  have 
been  "initiated  into  this  Life^"     We  shall 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     123 

no  doubt  still  puzzle  over  the  dark  enigmas 
of  pain  and  death,  of  war  and  its  train 
of  woe,  but  we  shall  do  well  to  remember 
that  there  is  a  greater  mystery  than 
any  of  these  —  the  mystery  of  the  suffer- 
ing, yet  ever-conquering  love  of  God 
which  no  one  knows  except  he  who  is 
immersed  in  it. 


The  word  "authority"  has  shifted  its 
meaning  many  times.  We  do  not  mean 
now  by  it  what  churchmen  of  former 
times  meant  when  they  used  it.  Even 
as  late  as  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth 
century  a  great  French  scholar,  Auguste 
Sabatier,  wrote  an  influential  book  in 
which  he  contrasted  "Religions  of  Au- 
thority" with  "Religions  of  the  Spirit." 
By  religions  of  authority  he  meant  types 
of  religion  which  rest  on  a  dogmatic 
basis  and  on  the  super-ordinary  power 
of  ecclesiastical  oflBcials  to  guarantee  the 


124  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

truth.  However  authoritative  a  religion 
of  that  type  may  once  have  been,  it  is 
so  no  longer,  at  least  with  those  who  have 
caught  the  intellectual  spirit  of  our  age. 

"Authority"  is  found  now  for  most  of 
us  where  the  common  people  who  listened 
to  Jesus  found  it  —  in  the  convincing  and 
verifying  power  of  the  message  itself. 
We  should  not  now  think  for  a  moment 
of  taking  our  views  on  astronomy  or 
geology  or  physiology  —  about  the  cir- 
culation of  the  blood,  for  instance  —  on 
the  "authority"  of  a  priest,  assuming 
that  his  ordination  supplied  him  with 
oracular  knowledge  on  these  subjects. 
We  want  to  know  rather  what  the  facts 
in  any  one  of  these  fields  compel  us  to 
conclude,  and  we  go  for  assistance  to 
persons  who  have  trained  and  disciplined 
their  powers  of  observation  and  who  can 
make  us  see  what  they  see.  Our  "au- 
thority" in  the  last  resort  to-day  is  the 
evidence  of  observable  facts  and  legitimate 
inference  from  these  facts.  A  religion  of 
authority,  then,  for  our  generation  rests, 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF   EXPERIENCE     125 

not  on  the  infallible  guarantee  of  any 
ordained  man,  or  of  any  miraculously 
equipped  church,  but  on  the  spiritual 
nature  of  human  life  itself  and  on  the 
verifiable  relations  of  the  soul  with  the 
unseen  realities  of  the  universe. 

I  need  hardly  say  —  it  is  so  plain  that 
the  runner  can  see  it  —  that  the  so-called 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  one  of  the  best 
illustrations  available  of  this  type  of 
authoritative  religion.  Whatever  is  de- 
clared as  truth  in  that  discourse  is  true, 
not  because  a  messenger  from  heaven 
brought  it,  not  because  a  supernatural 
authority  guaranteed  it,  but  because  it 
is  inherently  so,  and  if  any  statement 
here  obviously  conflicted  with  the  facts 
of  life  and  stood  confuted  by  the  testi- 
mony of  the  soul  itself,  it  would  in  the 
end,  in  the  long  run  as  we  say,  have  to 
go.  The  whole  message,  from  the  beati- 
tude upon  the  poor-in-spirit  to  the  judg- 
ment test  of  life  in  action,  as  revealed  in 
the  figure  of  the  two  houses,  is  a  message 
which   can   be   verified   and   tried   out   as 


126  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

searchingly  as  can  the  law  of  gravitation 
or  the  theory  of  luminiferous  ether.  All 
the  results  that  are  here  announced  are 
results  which  attach  to  the  essential 
nature  of  the  soul,  and  the  conditions 
of  blessedness  are  as  much  bound  up 
with  the  nature  of  things  as  are  the  con- 
ditions of  physical  health  for  a  man,  or 
the  conditions  of  literary  success  for  an 
author. 

Any  one  who  has  read  William  James' 
chapter  on  ^' Habit"  knows  how  it  feels  to 
be  reading  something  which  verifies  it- 
self and  which  convicts  the  judgment  of 
the  reader  in  almost  every  sentence.  As 
one  comes  toward  the  end  of  the  chapter 
he  finds  these  words:  "Every  smallest 
stroke  of  virtue  or  of  vice  leaves  its  never 
so  little  scar.  The  drunken  Rip  Van 
Winkle  excuses  himself  for  every  fresh 
dereliction  by  saying,  *I  won't  count 
this  time!'  Well!  he  may  not  count  it, 
and  a  kind  heaven  may  not  count  it; 
but  it  is  being  counted  none  the  less. 
Down    among   the    nerve  cells  and   fibers 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     127 

the  molecules  are  counting  it,  registering 
and  storing  it  up  to  be  used  against 
him  when  the  next  temptation  comes." 
These  words  have  the  irresistible  drive  of 
observable  facts  behind  them.  We  have 
come  upon  something  which  is  so  because 
it  is  so.  It  can  no  more  be  juggled  with 
or  dodged  than  can  the  fact  of  the  pre- 
cession of  the  equinoxes.  The  calm  au- 
thority of  that  chapter  might  well  be 
the  envy  of  every  preacher  of  the  gospel 
and  of  every  writer  of  articles  on  religion. 
If  either  the  preacher  or  the  religious 
writer  expects  to  speak  to  the  condition 
of  his  age,  then  he  must  acquire  this 
authoritative  way  of  dealing  with  the 
issues  of  life,  for  the  other  kind  of  "au- 
thority" has  had  its  day. 

It  is  interesting  to  discover  that  Ter- 
tullian  and  St.  Augustine  —  two  men 
who,  almost  beyond  all  others,  helped  to 
forge  this  waning  type  of  "authority" 
—  came  very  near  risking  the  whole  case 
of  religion  in  their  day  on  the  primary 
authority    of    first-hand    experience    and 


128  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

the  testimony  of  the  soul  itself.  "I  call 
in,''  Tertullian  wrote,  "a  new  testimony; 
yea,  one  that  is  better  known  than  all 
literature,  more  discussed  than  all  doc- 
trine, more  public  than  all  publications, 
greater  than  the  whole  man  —  I  mean 
all  which  is  man's.  Stand  forth,  O  soul, 
.  .  .  and  give  thy  witness  ...  I  want 
thy  experience.  I  demand  of  thee  the 
things  thou  bringest  with  thee  into  man, 
the  things  thou  knowest  either  from  thy- 
self or  from  thy  Author.  .  .  .  Whenever 
the  soul  comes  to  itself,  as  out  of  a  sur- 
feit or  a  sleep  or  a  sickness  and  attains 
something  of  its  natural  soundness,  it 
speaks  of  God." 

Nobody  has  ever  shown  more  skill  and 
subtlety  in  examining  the  actual  processes 
of  the  inner  life  than  has  Augustine,  nor 
has  any  one  more  powerfully  revealed 
the  native  hunger  of  the  soul  for  God,  or 
the  cooperative  working  of  divine  grace 
in  the  inner  region  where  all  the  issues 
of  life  are  settled.  Take  this  vivid  pas- 
sage,   picturing    the    hesitating    will,    zig- 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE     129 

zagging  between  the  upward  pull  and  the 
tug  of  the  old  self  just  before  the  last 
great  act  of  decision  which  led  to  his 
conversion. 

"Thus  was  I  sick  and  suffering  In  mind, 
upbraiding  myself  more  bitterly  than 
ever  before,  twisting  and  turning  in  my 
chains  in  the  hope  that  they  would  soon 
snap,  for  they  had  almost  worn  too  thin 
to  hold  me.  Yet  they  did  still  hold  me. 
But  Thou  wast  instant  with  me  in  the 
inner  man,  with  merciful  severity,  re- 
doubling the  lashes  of  fear  and  shame, 
lest  I  should  cease  from  struggling.  .  .  . 
I  kept  saying  within  my  heart,  *Let 
it  be  now,  now ! '  —  and  with  the  word  I 
was  on  the  point  of  going  on  to  the  re- 
solve. I  had  almost  done  it,  but  I  had 
not  done  it;  and  yet  I  did  not  slip  back 
to  where  I  was  at  first,  but  held  my  foot- 
ing at  a  short  remove  and  drew  breath. 
And  again  I  tried ;  I  came  a  little  nearer, 
and  again  a  little  nearer,  and  now  —  now 
—  I  was  in  act  to  grasp  and  hold  it ;  but 
still  I  did  not  reach  it,  nor  grasp  it,  nor 

K 


I30  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

hold  it,  .  .  .  for  the  worse  that  I  knew 
so  well  had  more  power  over  me  than  the 
better  that  I  knew  not,  and  the  absolute 
point  of  time  at  which  I  was  to  change 
filled  me  with  greater  dread  the  more 
nearly  I  approached  it." 

That  is  straight  out  of  life.  The  thing 
which  really  matters  there  is  not  some 
fine-spun  dogma  or  the  power  of  some 
mitered  priest,  but  the  answer  of  the  soul, 
the  obedience  of  the  will  in  the  presence 
of  what  is  unmistakably  divine.  "The 
whole  work  of  this  life,"  he  once  said, 
"is  to  heal  the  eye  of  the  heart  by  which 
we  see  God."  Both  these  men  made  great 
contributions  to  the  imperial,  authorita- 
tive church  and  they  were  foremost  archi- 
tects of  the  immense  system  of  dogma 
under  which  men  lived  for  long  centuries, 
but  the  religion  by  which  they  themselves 
lived  was  born  in  their  own  experience, 
and  back  of  all  their  secondary  authority 
was  this  primary  authority  of  the  soul's 
own  testimony. 

What  our  generation  needs  above  every- 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      131 

thing,  if  I  read  its  problems  rightly,  is  a 
clearer  interpretation  of  the  spiritual  capac- 
ities and  the  unseen  compulsions  of  the 
ordinary  human  soul ;  that  is  to  say,  a 
more  authoritative  and  so  more  compell- 
ing psychological  account  of  the  actual 
and  potential  nature  of  our  own  human 
self,  with  its  amazing  depths  and  its  in- 
finite relationships.  We  have  had  fifteen 
hundred  years  under  the  dogma  of  original 
sin  and  total  depravity;  now  let  us  have 
a  period  of  actually  facing  our  own  souls 
as  they  reveal  themselves,  not  to  the 
theologian,  but  to  the  expert  in  souls. 
We  shall  find  them  mysterious  and  bad 
enough  no  doubt,  but  we  shall  also  find 
that  they  are  strangely  linked  up  with 
that  unseen  and  yet  absolutely  real  Heart 
of  all  things  whom  we  call  God.  And  our 
generation  also  needs  a  more  authoritative 
account  of  Jesus  Christ  —  more  authorita- 
tive because  more  truly  and  more  his- 
torically drawn.  We  have  had  centuries 
of  the  Christ  of  dogma  and  even  to-day 
the  Church  is  split  and  sundered  by  its 


132  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

attempt  to  maintain  dogmatic  construc- 
tions about  His  Person.  Was  He  monophy- 
site  ?  Was  he  diphysite  ?  Those  dead 
questions  have  divided  the  world  in  former 
ages  and  still  rally  oriental  sects.  Our 
problem  is  different.  We  want  to  see 
how  He  lived.  We  want  to  discover 
what  He  said.  We  want  to  feel  the 
power  of  His  attractive  personality.  We 
want  to  find  out  what  His  own  experience 
was  and  what  bearing  it  has  on  life  to-day. 
We  need  to  have  Him  reinterpreted  to 
us  in  terms  of  life,  so  that  once  again  He 
becomes  for  us  as  real  and  as  dynamic 
as  He  was  for  Paul  in  Corinth  or  for 
John  in  Ephesus.  The  moment  anybody 
succeeds  in  doing  that,  He  proves  to  be  as 
much  alive  as  ever,  and  religion  becomes 
as  authoritative  as  ever.  Theology  is  not 
extinct,  but  it  is  becoming  wholly  trans- 
formed and  the  theology  of  the  coming 
time  will  be  a  knowledge  of  God  builded 
not  on  abstract  logic,  but  on  a  penetrating 
psychology  of  man's  inner  nature  and  a 
no  less  penetrating  interpretation  of  his- 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      133 

tory  and  biography,  especially  at  the 
points  where  the  revelation  of  God  has 
most  evidently  shone  forth  and  broken 
in  upon  us. 

VI 

SEEING   HIM   WHO    IS    INVISIBLE 

The  power  "to  see  the  invisible"  is  as 
essential  in  science,  in  philosophy,  in  art, 
and  in  common  life  as  it  is  in  religion. 
The  world  with  which  science  deals  is 
not  made  out  of  "things  that  do  appear." 
Every  step  in  the  advance  of  science  has 
been  made  by  the  discovery  of  invisible 
things  which  explain  the  crude  visible 
things  of  our  uncritical  experience.  We 
seldom  see  any  of  the  things  the  scientists 
talk  about  —  atoms  and  molecules  and 
cells,  laws  and  causes  and  energies.  These 
things  have  been  found  first,  not  with 
the  eyes  of  sense,  but  with  the  vision  of 
the  mind. 

Newton  found  the  support  that  holds 
the  earth  to  the  sun  and  the  moon  to  the 
earth,  but  there  was  no  visible  cable,  no 


134  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

mighty  grooves  in  which  the  poles  of  the 
earth's  axis  spin.  There  was  nothing  to 
see,  and  yet  his  mind  discovered  an  in- 
visible link  that  fastens  every  particle  of 
matter  in  the  universe  to  every  other 
particle,  however  remote.  One  fact  after 
another  has  forced  the  scientist  to-day  to 
draw  upon  an  invisible  world  of  ether  for 
his  explanations  of  a  vast  number  of  the 
things  that  appear.  Gravitation,  elec- 
trical phenomena,  light  and  color  vision, 
and,  perhaps,  the  very  origin  of  matter, 
are  due,  his  mind  sees,  to  the  presence  of 
this  extraordinary  world  within,  or  be- 
hind, the  world  we  see. 

One  of  the  greatest  advances  that  has 
ever  been  made  in  the  progress  of  medicine 
was  made  through  the  discovery  of  in- 
visible microbes  as  the  cause  of  contagious 
and  infectious  diseases.  The  ancients  had 
also  believed  the  cause  of  many  diseases 
to  be  the  presence  of  invisible  agents, 
which  they  called  "demons,"  but  they 
could  hit  upon  no  way  of  finding  the 
"demons"    or    of    banishing    them.     The 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      135 

scientific  physician  "sees"  the  invisible 
microbe  and  he  "sees"  what  will  put  this 
enemy  hors  de  combat. 

The  study  of  philosophy  is  chiefly  the 
cultivation  of  the  power  to  see  the  in- 
visible. Pythagoras  is  said  to  have  re- 
quired a  period  of  a  year  of  silence  as  an 
initiation  into  the  business  of  philosophy 
—  because  there  was  nothing  to  talk  about 
until  the  beginner  had  learned  how  to  see 
the  invisible  !  The  great  realities  to  which 
the  philosopher  is  dedicated  are  not  things 
to  be  found,  even  with  microscopes  or 
telescopes.  Nobody  is  qualified  to  enter 
the  philosophical  race  at  all  —  even  for 
the  hundred-yard  dash  —  unless  in  the 
temporal  he  can  see  the  eternal,  and  in 
the  visible  the  invisible,  and  in  the  ma- 
terial the  spiritual.  There  can  be  no 
artistic  creation  until  some  one  comes  who 
has  "the  faculty  divine"  to  see 

"The  gleam, 
The  light  that  never  was,  on  sea  or  land.'* 

Such  artistic  creations  must  not  be  unreal. 


136  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  IV 

On  the  contrary,  they  must  be  more  real 
than  the  scenes  we  photograph  or  the 
factual  events  we  describe.  They  must 
present  to  us  something  that  is  in  all 
respects  as  it  ought  to  be.  The  artist,  the 
poet,  the  musician  succeed  in  making 
some  object,  or  some  character,  or  some 
series  of  events  or  sounds  raise  us  above 
our  usual  restraints  of  space  and  time  and 
imperfection  and  for  a  moment  give  us  a 
glimpse  of  something  eternal. 

But  we  see  the  invisible  in  our  common 
daily  life  much  more  than  we  realize. 
The  simple  cobbler  of  shoes  stitches  and 
pegs  at  his  little  shoe,  and  makes  it  as 
honestly  as  he  can,  for  some  child  whom  he 
has  never  seen  and  perhaps  never  will  see. 
The  merchant  expands  his  business  be- 
cause he  forecasts  the  expanding  need  for 
his  articles  in  China,  Africa,  or  South 
America.  The  statesman  at  every  move 
is  dealing  as  much  with  the  country  of 
his  inner  vision  as  with  the  country  his 
eyes  see.  So,  too,  is  the  parent  as  he 
plans  for  the  discipline  and  education  of 


Ch.  IV]    THE  WAY  OF  EXPERIENCE      137 

his  child.  No  one  can  be  a  good  person 
—  however  simple,  or  however  great  — 
without  leaving  the  things  that  are  behind, 
i.e.  the  things  that  are  actual,  and  going 
on  to  realize  what  is  not  yet  apprehended, 
what  exists  only  in  forecast  and  vision. 
Religion,  then,  is  not  alone  in  demand- 
ing the  supreme  faculty  of  seeing  the 
invisible.  We  live  on  all  life-levels  by 
faith,  by  assent  to  realities  which  are  not 
there  for  our  eyes.  Religion  only  demands 
of  us  that  we  see  the  whole  Reality  which 
this  visible  fragment  of  nature  implies, 
that  we  see  the  larger  spirit  which  our 
own  human  spirits  call  for,  that  we  see 
the  eternal  significance  revealed  in  the 
life  of  Christ  and  in  the  conquests  of  His 
spirit  through  the  ages. 


CHAPTER  V 

A  FUNDAMENTAL  SPIRITUAL 
OUTLOOK 

The  most  important  constructive  work 
just  now  laid  upon  us  is  the  serious  task 
of  helping  to  restore  faith  in  the  actual 
reality  of  God  and  in  the  fundamental 
spiritual  nature  of  our  world.  There  is 
no  substitute  for  the  transforming  power 
and  inward  depth  which  an  irresistible 
first-hand  conviction  of  God  gives  a  man. 
Carlyle,  in  his  usual  vivid  fashion,  says 
that  one  man  with  faith  in  God  is 
"stronger,  not  than  ten  men  that  have 
it  not,  or  than  ten  thousand,  but  than  all 
men  that  have  it  not!"  A  man  can  face 
anything  when  he  knows  absolutely  that 
at  bottom  the  universe  is  not  force  nor 
mechanism  but  intelligent  and  loving  pur- 
pose, and  that  through  the  seeming  con- 
138 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  139 

fusion  and  welter  there  is  a  loving,  throb- 
bing, personal  Heart  answering  back  to  us. 
The  cultivation  of  this  experience  is  the 
greatest  prophetic  mission  laid  upon  the 
spiritual  leaders  of  any  age.  Isaiah  is  at 
his  fullest  stature  when  in  a  fearful  crisis 
he  calls  his  nation  from  a  military  alli- 
ance with  Egypt,  whose  people,  he  says, 
are  "men  and  not  God  and  whose  horses 
are  flesh  and  not  spirit,"  to  a  reliance  on 
God  and  on  eternal  resources  :  "  In  return- 
ing and  rest  shall  ye  be  saved ;  in  quietness 
and  confidence  shall  be  your  strength." 
George  Fox  is  most  clearly  a  prophet 
when  he  reports  his  own  experience  of 
God:  "I  saw  that  there  was  an  ocean  of 
darkness  and  death,  but  that  an  infinite 
ocean  of  light  and  love  flowed  over  the 
ocean  of  darkness.  In  that  I  saw  the  in- 
finite love  of  God." 

If  we  are  to  assist  in  the  creation  of  a 
higher  civilization  than  that  against  which 
the  hand  on  the  wall  is  writing  "mene," 
we  must  speak  of  God  in  the  present 
tense,  we  must  live  by  truths  and  convic- 


I40  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

tions  that  are  grounded  in  our  own  ex- 
perience, and  we  must  endeavor  to  find  a 
spiritual  basis  underlying  all  the  processes 
of  the  world.  Men  have  been  living  for  a 
generation  —  or  at  least  trying  to  live  — 
on  a  naturalistic  interpretation  of  the  uni- 
verse which  chokes  and  stifles  the  higher 
spiritual  life  of  man.  We  must  help  those 
who  have  been  caught  in  this  drift  of 
materialism  to  find  their  way  back  to  the 
spiritual  meaning  of  the  world. 

We  get  a  vivid  impression  of  the  stern 
and  iron  character  of  this  materialistic 
universe  from  the  writings  of  Bertrand 
Russell.     Here  are  two  extracts  : 


"Man  is  the  product  of  causes  which  had  no 
prevision  of  the  end  they  were  achieving;  his 
origin,  his  growth,  his  hopes  and  fears,  his  loves 
and  his  beliefs,  are  but  the  outcome  of  accidental 
collocations  of  atoms;  no  fire,  no  heroism,  no  in- 
tensity of  thought  and  feeling,  can  preserve  an 
individual  Hfe  beyond  the  grave;  all  the  labours 
of  the  ages,  all  the  devotion,  all  the  inspiration,  all 
the  noonday  brightness  of  human  genius,  are 
destined   to   extinction   in   the   vast   death   of  the 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  141 

solar  system,  and  the  whole  temple  of  man's  achieve- 
ment must  inevitably  be  buried  beneath  the  debris 
of  a  universe  in  ruins  —  all  these  things,  if  not 
quite  beyond  dispute,  are  yet  so  nearly  certain, 
that  no  philosophy  which  rejects  them  can  hope 
to  stand.  Only  within  the  scaffolding  of  these 
truths,  only  on  the  firm  foundation  of  unyielding 
despair,  can  the  soul's  habitation  henceforth  be 
safely  built."  ^ 

**  Brief  and  powerless  is  man's  life ;  on  him  and 
all  his  race  the  slow,  sure  doom  falls  pitiless  and 
dark.  Blind  to  good  and  evil,  reckless  of  destruc- 
tion, omnipotent  matter  rolls  on  its  relentless  way; 
for  Man,  condemned  to-day  to  lose  his  dearest,  to- 
morrow himself  to  pass  through  the  gate  of  dark- 
ness, it  remains  only  to  cherish,  ere  yet  the  blow 
falls,  the  lofty  thoughts  that  ennoble  his  little 
day;  disdaining  the  coward  terrors  of  the  slave  of 
Fate,  to  worship  at  the  shrine  that  his  own  hands 
have  built;  undismayed  by  the  empire  of  chance, 
to  preserve  a  mind  free  from  the  wanton  tyranny 
that  rules  his  outward  life;  proudly  defiant  of  the 
irresistible  forces  that  tolerate,  for  a  moment,  his 
knowledge  and  his  condemnation,  to  sustain  alone,  a 
weary  but  unyielding  Atlas,  the  world  that  his  own 
ideals  have  fashioned  despite  the  trampling  march 
of  unconscious  power,"  ^ 

^  Bertrand  Russell's  Philosophical  Essay s,  pp.  60,  61. 
2  Ibid.,  p.  70. 


142  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

Much  of  the  present  confusion  has  been 
due  to  a  false  interpretation  of  the  doc- 
trine of  evolution.  It  has  been  assumed 
—  not  indeed  by  scientists  of  the  first 
rank,  but  by  a  host  of  influential  inter- 
preters —  that  the  basis  of  evolution,  the 
law  which  runs  the  cosmic  train,  is  com- 
petitive struggle  for  existence,  that  is  to 
say  the  natural  selection  of  the  fittest  to 
survive,  and  the  fittest  on  this  count  are 
of  course  the  physically  fittest,  the  most 
efficient.  This  principle,  used  first  to 
explain  biological  development,  has  been 
taken  up  and  expanded  and  used  to  ex- 
plain all  ethical  and  social  progress.  Any 
nation  that  has  won  out  and  prevailed 
has  done  so,  on  this  theory,  because  it 
made  itself  stronger  than  those  nations 
with  which  it  competed.  This  theory  has 
contributed  immensely  toward  bringing  on 
the  catastrophe  in  Europe.  It  is  a  breeder 
of  racial  rivalries,  it  is  loaded  with  emo- 
tional stress,  it  cultivates  fear,  one  of  the 
main  causes  of  war,  and  it  runs  on  all  fours 
with  materialism. 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  143 

But  it  does  not  fit  the  facts  of  life  and 
it  is  as  much  a  mental  construction  and  as 
untrue  to  the  complete  nature  of  things 
as  were  the  popular  pre-evolution  theories. 
Here,  as  everywhere  else,  the  truth  is  the 
only  adequate  remedy,  and  the  truth  would 
set  men  free.  Biologists  of  the  most 
eminent  rank  have  all  along  been  insist- 
ing that  life  has  not  evolved  through  the 
operation  of  one  single  factor ;  for  example, 
the  law  of  competing  struggle.  Every- 
where in  the  process,  from  lowest  to 
highest,  there  has  been  present  the  opera- 
tion of  another  force  as  primary  as  the 
egoistic  factor,  namely  the  operation  of 
mutual  aid,  cooperation,  struggle  for  the 
life  of  others,  mother-traits  and  father- 
traits,  sacrifice  of  self  for  the  group,  a 
love-factor  implicit  at  the  bottom  but 
gloriously  conscious  and  consecrated  at  the 
top.  Nature  has  always  been  forerunning 
and  crying  in  the  wilderness  that  the  way 
of  love  will  work. 

It  is  impossible  to  account  for  a  con- 
tinuously   progressive    evolution    on    any 


144  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

mechanical  basis.  As  soon  as  life  ap- 
peared there  came  into  play  some  degree 
of  spontaneity,  something  unpredictable ; 
something  which  is  not  mechanism.  The 
future  in  any  life-series  is  never  an  equa- 
tion with  the  past.  What  has  been,  does 
not  quite  determine  what  will  be.  Life 
carries  in  itself  a  creative  tendency  —  a 
tendency  to  exhibit  surprises,  novelties, 
variations,  mutations,  unpredictable  leaps. 
We  can  name  this  tendency,  this  upward- 
changing  drive,  "vital  impulse,"  but  how- 
ever we  name  it,  we  cannot  explain  it. 
The  variation  which  raises  the  entire 
level  of  life  is  as  mysterious  as  a  virgin 
birth,  or  a  resurrection  from  the  dead. 
There  is  no  help  in  the  word  "fortuitous," 
or  "accidental,"  there  is  no  answer  when 
the  appeal  is  made  either  to  heredity  or  to 
physical  environment.  There  is  in  favor- 
able mutations  a  revelation  of  some  kind 
of  intelligent  push,  a  power  of  life  work- 
ing toward  an  end.  The  end  or  goal  of 
the  process  seems  to  be  an  operative 
factor  in  the  process.     Evolution  seems  to 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  145 

be  due  to  a  mighty  living,  conscious, 
spiritual  driving  force,  that  is  pouring 
itself  forth  in  ever-heightening  ways  of 
manifestation  and  that  differentiates  itself 
into  myriad  varieties  of  form  and  activity, 
each  one  with  its  own  peculiar  potency  of 
advance.  Consciousness,  in  Henri  Berg- 
son's  illuminating  interpretation  of  evolu- 
tion, is  the  original  creative  cosmic  force. 
It  is  before  matter,  and  its  onward  destiny 
is  not  bound  up  with  matter.  Wherever 
it  appears  there  is  vital  impulse,  upward- 
pointing  mutations,  free  action,  and  po- 
tency. But  no  life  is  isolated  or  cut 
apart.  Each  particular  manifestation  of 
life  is  one  of  the  rills  into  which  the  im- 
mense river  of  consciousness  divides,  and 
this  irresistible  river  with  Its  onward  leaps 
seems  able  to  beat  down  every  resistance 
and  clear  away  the  most  formidable  ob- 
stacles —  perhaps  even  death  Itself. 

But  it  Is  not  merely  in  the  evolutionary 
process  that  we  need  to  reinterpret  the 
spiritual  factor;  It  is  urgently  called  for 
in  our  dealing  with  the  whole  of  nature. 

L 


146  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

We  must  learn  how  to  interpret  the 
fundamental  spiritual  implications  in- 
volved in  the  nature  of  beauty,  of  moral 
goodness,  of  verifiable  knowledge,  and  of 
personality  itself. 

In  an  impressive  way  Arthur  Balfour 
in  his  Theism  and  Humanism  has  pointed 
out  that  it  is  impossible  to  find  any  ade- 
quate rational  basis  for  our  experience  of 
beauty,  or  for  our  pursuit  of  moral  ends  of 
goodness,  or  for  our  confidence  in  the 
validity  of  knowledge  or  truth,  unless  we 
assume  the  reality  of  an  underlying  spiritual 
universe  as  the  root  and  ground  both  of 
nature  without  us  and  of  mind  within  us. 
"-Esthetic  values,"  Balfour  says,  "are  in 
part  dependent  upon  a  spiritual  concep- 
tion of  the  world  in  which  we  live."  ^ 
"Ethics,"  again  he  says,  "must  have 
its  roots  in  the  divine ;  and  in  the  divine 
it  must  find  its  consummation"  ^  and, 
finally,  he  says  that  if  rational  values  are 
to    remain    undimmed    and    unimpaired, 

1  Arthur  Balfour's  Theism  and  Humanism,  p.  87. 
^Ibid.yp.  134. 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  147 

God  must  be  treated  as  real  —  "He  is 
Himself  the  condition  of  scientific  knowl- 
edge."^—  "We  must  hold  that  reason 
and  the  works  of  reason  have  their  source 
in  God :  that  from  Him  they  draw  their 
inspiration,  and  that  if  they  repudiate 
their  origin,  by  this  very  act  they  proclaim 
their  own  insufficiency."  ^ 

Personality  carries  in  all  its  larger  as- 
pects inevitable  implications  of  a  spiritual 
universe.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  forever 
utterly  impossible  to  find  a  materialistic 
or  naturalistic  origin  for  personality. 
Whenever  we  deal  with  "matter"  or 
with  "nature,"  consciousness  is  always 
presupposed,  and  the  "matter"  we  talk 
about,  or  the  "nature"  we  talk  about, 
is  "matter"  or  "nature"  as  existing  for 
consciousness  or  as  conceived  by  con- 
sciousness. It  is  impossible  to  get  any 
world  at  all  without  a  uniting,  connect- 
ing principle  of  consciousness  which  binds 
fact  to  fact,  item  to  item,  event  to  event, 
into  a  whole  which  is  known  to  us  through 

1  Ibid.,  p.  273.  2  /^{j,^  p,  274. 


148  THE   INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

the  action  of  our  organizing  consciousness. 
Since  it  is  through  consciousness  that  a 
connected  universe  of  experience  is  pos- 
sible it  seems  absurd  to  suppose  that 
consciousness  is  a  product  of  matter  or 
of  any  natural,  mechanical  process.  Every 
effort  to  find  a  genesis  of  knowledge  in  any 
other  source  than  spirit,  derived  in  turn 
from  self-existing  Spirit,  has  always  failed 
and  from  the  logical  nature  of  the  case 
must  fail.  There  is  no  answer  to  the 
question,  how  did  we  begin  to  be  persons  ? 
which  does  not  refer  the  genesis  to  an 
eternal  spiritual  Principle  in  the  universe, 
transcending  space  and  time,  life  and 
death,  matter  and  motion,  cause  and 
effect  —  a  Principle  which  itself  is  the 
condition  of  temporal  beginnings  and 
temporal  changes  or  ends. 

Normal  human  experience  is,  too,  heavily 
loaded  with  further  inevitable  implications 
of  an  environing  spiritual  world.  The 
consciousness  of  finiteness  with  which  we 
are  haunted  presupposes  something  infinite 
already  in  consciousness,  just  as  our  knowl- 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  149 

edge  of  "spaces"  presupposes  space,  of 
which  definite  spaces  are  determinate 
parts.  That  we  are  oppressed  with  our 
own  littleness,  that  we  revolt  from  our 
meannesses,  that  we  *'look  before  and 
after,  and  sigh  for  what  is  not,"  that  we 
are  never  satisfied  with  any  achievement, 
that  each  attainment  inaugurates  a  new 
drive,  that  we  feel  "the  glory  of  the  im- 
perfect," means  that  in  some  way  we  par- 
take of  an  infinite  revealed  in  us  by  an 
inherent  necessity  of  self-consciousness. 
We  are  made  for  something  which  does 
not  yet  appear,  we  are  inalienably  kin  to 
the  perfect  that  always  draws  and  attracts 
us.  We  are  forever  seeking  God  because, 
in  some  sense,  however  fragmentary,  we 
have  found  Him. 

"Here  sits  he  shaping  wings  to  fly; 
His  heart  forbodes  a  mystery  : 
He  names  the  name  Eternity. 

"That  type  of  Perfect  in  his  mind 
In  Nature  can  he  nowhere  find. 
He  sows  himself  on  every  wind. 


150  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

"He  seems  to  hear  a  heavenly  Friend, 
And  through  thick  veils  to  apprehend 
A  labor  working  to  an  end."  ^ 

The  most  august  thing  in  us  is  that 
creative  center  of  our  being,  that  autono- 
mous citadel  of  personality,  where  we  form 
for  ourselves  ideals  of  beauty,  of  truth, 
and  of  goodness  by  which  we  live.  This 
power  to  extend  life  in  ideal  fashion  is 
the  elemental  moral  fact  of  personal  life. 
These  ideals  which  shape  our  life  are 
manifestly  things  which  cannot  be  "found" 
anywhere  in  our  world  of  sense  experience. 
They  are  not  on  land  or  sea.  We  live, 
and,  when  the  call  for  it  comes,  we  joy- 
ously die  for  things  which  our  eyes  have 
never  seen  in  this  world  of  molecular  cur- 
rents, for  things  which  are  not  here  in  the 
world  of  space,  but  which  are  not  on  that 
account  any  less  real.  We  create,  by 
some  higher  drive  of  spirit,  visions  of  a 
world  that  ought  to  he  and  these  visions 
make  us  forever  dissatisfied  with  the  world 
that  is,  and  it  is  through  these  visions  that 

^  Tennyson's  Two  Voices. 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  151 

we  reshape  and  reconstruct  the  world 
which  is  being  made.  The  elemental 
spiritual  core  in  us  which  we  call  con- 
science can  have  come  from  nowhere  but 
from  a  deeper  spiritual  universe  with 
which  we  have  relations.  It  cannot  be 
traced  to  any  physical  origin.  It  cannot 
be  reduced  to  any  biological  function.  It 
cannot  be  explained  in  utilitarian  terms. 
It  is  an  august  and  authoritative  loyalty 
of  soul  to  a  Good  that  transcends  all 
goods  and  which  will  not  allow  us  to 
substitute  prudence  for  intrinsic  goodness. 
This  inner  imperative  overarches  our  moral 
life,  and  it  rationally  presupposes  a  spirit- 
ual universe  with  which  we  are  allied. 

There  is,  too,  an  immense  interior  depth 
to  our  human  personality.  Only  the  sur- 
face of  our  inner  self  is  lighted  up  and  is 
brought  into  clear  focal  consciousness. 
There  are,  however,  dim  depths  under- 
lying every  moment  of  consciousness  and 
these  subterranean  deeps  are  all  the  time 
shaping  or  determining  the  ideas,  emotions, 
and    decisions    which    surge    up    into    the 


152  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

illuminated  apex  of  consciousness.  This 
submerged  life  is  in  part,  no  doubt,  the 
slow  deposit  of  previous  experiences,  the 
gathered  wisdom  of  the  social  group  in 
which  we  are  imbedded,  the  residual 
savings  from  unuttered  hopes  and  wishes, 
aspirations  and  intentions, 

"All  I  could  never  be, 
All,  men  ignored  in  me." 

But  at  times  our  interior  deep  seems  to 
be  more  than  a  deposit  of  the  past.  In- 
cursions from  beyond  our  own  margin 
seem  to  occur.  Inrushes  from  a  wider 
spiritual  world  seem  to  take  place.  Vital- 
izing, energizing,  constructive  forces  come 
from  somewhere  into  men,  as  though 
another  universe  impinged  upon  our  finite 
spirits.  We  cannot  prove  by  these  some- 
what rare  and  unusual  mystical  openings 
that  there  is  an  actual  spiritual  environ- 
ment surrounding  our  souls,  but  there  are 
certainly  experiences  which  are  best  ex- 
plained on  that  hypothesis,  and  there  is 
no  good  reason  for  drawing  any  impervious 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  153 

boundary  around  the  margins  of  the 
spiritual  self  within  us. 

All  attempts  to  reduce  man's  inner 
spiritual  life  to  the  play  of  molecular 
forces  have  fallen  through.  Correlation 
between  mind  and  brain  cortex  there 
certainly  is  and  spirit,  as  we  know  it, 
expresses  itself  under,  or  in  relation  to, 
certain  physical  conditions.  But  it  is  im- 
possible to  establish  a  complete  parallel- 
ism between  mind-functions  and  brain- 
functions.  The  psychical,  that  is  to  say 
spirit,  seems  immensely  to  outrun  its 
organ  and  to  use  brain  as  a  musician  uses 
an  instrument. 

The  psychological  studies  of  Henri  Berg- 
son  in  France  and  of  Dr.  William  McDou- 
gall  at  Oxford  make  a  very  strong  argu- 
ment for  the  view  that  the  higher  forms 
of  consciousness  cannot  be  explained  in 
terms  of  brain  action  and  that  there  is 
no  well-defined  physical  correlate  to  the 
highest  and  most  central  psychical  pro- 
cesses. I  shall  follow  in  the  main  the 
positions    of    my    old    teacher,    Dr.    Mc- 


154  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

Dougall,  as  worked  out  in  his  Body  and 
Mind. 

One  of  the  most  important  differences 
between  human  and  animal  consciousness 
comes  to  light  in  the  appearance  of  "mean- 
ing" which  is  a  differentiating  character- 
istic of  personal  consciousness.  We  pass 
*'a  great  divide"  when  we  pass  from  bare 
sensory  experience,  common  to  all  higher 
animals,  to  consciousness  of  '''meaning,^^ 
which  is  a  trait  common  only  to  persons. 
We  all  know  what  it  is  to  hear  words 
which  make  a  clear  impression  and  which 
yet  arouse  no  "meaning."  We  often 
gaze  at  objects  and  yet,  like  Macbeth, 
have  "no  speculation  in  our  eyes"  —  we 
apprehend  no  significant  "meaning"  in  the 
thing  upon  which  we  are  looking.  We 
sometimes  catch  ourselves  in  the  very 
act  of  passing  from  mere  sense  or  bare 
image  to  the  higher  level  of  "meaning." 
While  we  gaze  or  while  we  listen  we  sud- 
denly feel  the  "meaning"  flood  in  and 
transform  the  whole  content  of  conscious- 
ness.    All  the  higher  ranges  of  experience 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  155 

depend  on  this  unique  feature  which  is 
something  over  and  above  the  mere  sen- 
sory stage.  The  words,  "the  quality  of 
mercy  is  not  strain'd"  remain  just  word- 
sounds  until  in  a  flash  one  sees  that  mercy 
is  "not  something  that  comes  out  grudg- 
ingly in  drops,"  and  then  the  mind  rises 
to  "a  consciousness  of  meaning."  ^  In 
this  higher  experience,  "meaning"  stands 
vividly  in  the  focus  of  consciousness  and, 
in  a  case,  for  instance,  of  grasping  a  long 
sentence,  or  of  appreciating  a  piece  of 
music,  consciousness  of  "meaning"  is  an 
integral  unitary  whole.  Now  there  is  no 
corresponding  unitary  whole  in  the  brain 
which  could  stand  as  the  physical  corre- 
late to  this  consciousness  of  "meaning." 
The  simple  sensational  experiences  corre- 
spond in  some  way  to  parallel  brain  pro- 
cesses but  these  elemental  experiences  are 
merely  cues  which  evoke  higher  forms  of 
psychical  "meaning,"  that  have  no  physical 
or  mechanical  correlate  in  the  brain. 
This  is  still  more  strikingly  the  case  in 

1  Titchener's  Beginner's  Psychology,  p.  19. 


156  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

the  higher  forms  of  memory.  The  lower 
and  more  mechanical  forms  of  memory 
may  be  treated  as  a  habit-sequence,  linked 
up  with  permanent  brain  paths.  But 
memory  proper  depends,  as  does  "mean- 
ing," upon  a  single  act  of  mental  appre- 
hension. As  McDougall  well  says:  "the 
whole  process  and  effect,  the  apprehension 
and  the  retention  and  the  remembering, 
are  absolutely  unique  and  distinct  from 
all  other  apprehensions  and  retentions 
and  rememberings."  ^  The  higher  kind  of 
memory  involves  "meaning"  and,  the 
moment  "meaning"  floods  in,  vast  and 
complicated  wholes  of  experience  tend  to 
become  a  permanent  possession,  while 
only  with  multitudinous  repetitions  can 
we  fix  and  keep  processes  that  are  mean- 
ingless and  without  psychical  significance. 
But  here  once  more  this  higher  unitary 
consciousness  of  a  remembered  whole  of 
experience  has  no  assignable  physical  cor- 
relate in  the  brain-processes.  Certain  sen- 
sory cues  evoke  or  recall  a  synthetic  whole 

1  Dr.  William  McDougall's  Body  and  Mind,  p.  335. 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  157 

of  consciousness  which  has  no  parallel  in 
the  material  world. 

Still  more  obviously  in  the  higher  aes- 
thetic sentiments  and  volitional  processes 
is  there  a  spiritual  activity  which  tran- 
scends the  mechanical  and  physical  order. 
iEsthetic  joy  depends  upon  a  spiritual 
power  to  combine  many  elements  of  ex- 
perience to  form  an  object  of  a  higher 
order  than  any  object  given  to  sense. 
It  is  particularly  true  of  the  highest  aes- 
thetic joy,  for  example,  enjoyment  of  poetic 
creations  where  the  ideal  and  intellectual 
element  vastly  overtops  the  sensuous,  and 
where  the  words  and  imagery  really  carry 
the  reader  on  into  another  world  than  the 
one  of  sight  and  sound.  Here  in  a  very 
high  degree  we  attain  a  unified  whole  of 
consciousness  that  has  no  physical  corre- 
late among  the  brain-processes.  It  is 
further  apparent  that  the  higher  forms  of 
pleasure  somehow  exert  an  effective  in- 
fluence upon  the  physical  system  itself  as 
though  some  new  and  heightening  energy 
poured  back  from  consciousness  into  the 


158  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

cerebral  processes  and  drained  down 
through  the  system.  William  James  has 
given  a  very  successful  account  of  the  way 
in  which  pleasure  and  pain  as  spiritual  en- 
ergies reinforce  or  damp  the  physical  activi- 
ties, so  that  the  personal  soul  seems  to  take 
a  unique  part  from  within  in  determining 
the  physical  process.    Here  are  his  words  : 

"Tremendous  as  the  part  is  which  pleasure  and 
pain  play  in  our  psychic  life,  we  must  confess  that 
absolutely  nothing  is  known  of  their  cerebral  con- 
ditions. It  is  hard  to  imagine  them  as  having 
special  centres;  it  is  harder  still  to  invent  peculiar 
forms  of  process  in  each  and  every  centre,  to  which 
these  feelings  may  be  due.  And  let  one  try  as  one 
will  to  represent  the  cerebral  activity  in  exclusively 
mechanical  terms,  I,  for  one,  find  it  quite  impossible 
to  enumerate  what  seem  to  be  the  facts  and  yet 
to  make  no  mention  of  the  psychic  side  which  they 
possess.  However  it  be  with  other  drainage  cur- 
rents and  discharges,  the  drainage  currents  and 
discharges  of  the  brain  are  not  purely  physical 
facts.  They  are  psycho-physical  facts,  and  the 
spiritual  quality  of  them  seems  a  codeterminant 
of  their  mechanical  eflfectiveness.  If  the  mechanical 
activities  in  a  cell,  as  they  increase,  give  pleasure, 
they  seem  to  increase  all  the  more  rapidly  for  that 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  159 

fact ;  if  they  give  displeasure,  the  displeasure  seems 
to  damp  the  activities.  The  psychic  side  of  the  phe- 
nomenon thus  seems  somewhat  like  the  applause  or 
hissing  atja  spectacle,  to  be  an  encouraging  or  adverse 
comment  on  what  the  machinery  brings  forth."  ^ 

The  unifying  effect  and  the  dynamic 
quality  of  a  persistent  resolution  of  will 
is  another  case  in  point  which  seems  to 
show  that  the  psychical  reality  in  us  vastly 
overtops  the  mechanism  through  which  it 
works.  A  fixed  purpose,  a  moral  ideal,  a 
determined  intention,  work  far-reaching 
results  and  in  some  way  organize  and  re- 
inforce the  entire  nervous  mechanism. 
The  whole  phenomenon  of  attention  which 
has  a  primary  importance  for  decisions 
of  will  and  immense  bearing  on  the  prob- 
lem of  freedom  of  will  is  something  which 
cannot  be  worked  out  in  brain-terms. 
There  seems  to  be  some  unifying  central 
psychical  core  within  us  that  raises  us 
out  of  the  level  of  mechanism  and  makes 
us  autonomous  creative  beings.  Once 
more  I  quote  William  James,  whom  many 

^  William  James'  Principles  of  Psychology ^  Vol.  II,  p. 
583. 


l6o  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

of  us  of  this  generation  revere  both  as 
teacher  and  friend : 

"It  often  takes  effort  to  keep  the  mind  upon  an 
object.  We  feel  that  we  can  make  more  or  less  of 
effort  as  we  choose.  If  this  feeUng  be  not  de- 
ceptive, if  our  effort  be  a  spiritual  force,  and  an 
indeterminate  one,  then  of  course  it  contributes 
coequally  with  the  cerebral  conditions  to  the  result. 
Though  it  introduce  no  new  idea,  it  will  deepen  and 
prolong  the  stay  in  consciousness  of  innumerable 
ideas  which  else  would  fade  more  quickly  away. 
The  delay  thus  gained  might  not  be  more  than  a 
second  in  duration  —  but  that  second  may  be 
critical;  for  in  the  constant  rising  and  falling  of 
considerations  in  the  mind,  where  two  associated 
systems  of  them  are  nearly  in  equilibrium  it  is 
often  a  matter  of  but  a  second  more  or  less  of  atten- 
tion at  the  outset,  whether  one  system  shall  gain 
force  to  occupy  the  field  and  develop  itself,  and 
exclude  the  other,  or  be  excluded  itself  by  the 
other.  When  developed,  it  may  make  us  act; 
and  that  act  may  seal  our  doom.  The  whole 
drama  of  the  voluntary  life  hinges  on  the  amount 
of  attention,  slightly  more  or  slightly  less,  which 
rival  motor  ideas  receive.  But  the  whole  feeling 
of  reality,  the  whole  sting  and  excitement  of  our 
voluntary  life,  depends  on  our  sense  that  in  it 
things  are  really  being  decided  from  one  moment  to 


Ch.  V]        A  SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  i6l 

another,  and  that  it  is  not  the  dull  rattling  off  of  a 
chain  that  was  forged  innumerable  ages  ago.  This 
appearance,  which  makes  life  and  history  tingle 
with  such  a  tragic  zest,  may  not  be  an  illusion. 
Effort  may  be  an  original  force  and  not  a  mere 
effect,  and  it  may  be  indeterminate  in  amount."  ^ 

There  are  thus  a  number  of  modes  of 
consciousness,  and  I  have  mentioned  only 
a  few  of  them,  which  have  no  traceable 
counterpart  in  the  physical  sphere,  and 
which  presuppose  a  spiritual  reality  at  the 
center  of  our  personal  life,  and  this  spirit- 
ual reality,  as  we  have  seen,  can  trace  its 
origin  only  to  a  self-existing,  self-explana- 
tory, environing  consciousness,  sufficiently 
personal  to  be  the  source  of  our  developing 
personality.  If  this  view  is  correct  and 
sound,  there  is  no  scientific  argument 
against  the  continuation  of  life  after 
death.  If  personality  is  fundamentally  a 
spiritual  affair  and  the  body  is  only  a 
medium  and  organ  here  in  space  and  time  of 
a  psychical  reality,  there  are  good  grounds 
and  solid  hopes  of  permanent  conservation. 

1  James'  Psychology  (Briefer  Course),  p.  237. 
M 


l62  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  V 

But  after  all  the  supreme  evidence  that 
the  universe  is  fundamentally  spiritual  is 
found  in  the  revelation  of  personal  life 
where  it  has  appeared  at  its  highest  and 
best  in  history,  that  is  in  Jesus  Christ. 
In  Him  we  have  a  master  manifestation 
of  that  creative  upward  tendency  of  life, 
a  surprising  mutation,  which  in  a  unique 
way  brought  into  history  an  unpredictable 
inrush  of  life's  higher  forces.  The  central 
fact  which  concerns  us  here  is  that  He 
is  the  revealing  organ  of  a  new  and  higher 
order  of  life.  We  cannot  appropriate  the 
gospel  by  reducing  it  to  a  doctrine,  nor 
by  crystallizing  it  Into  an  institution,  nor 
by  postponing  its  prophesies  of  moral 
achievement  to  some  remote  world  beyond 
the  stars.  We  can  appropriate  it  only 
when  we  realize  that  this  Christ  is  a 
revelation  here  In  time  and  mutability  of 
the  eternal  nature  and  character  of  that 
conscious  personal  Spirit  that  environs 
all  life  and  that  steers  the  entire  system 
of  things,  and  that  He  has  come  to  bring 
us  all  into  an  abundant  life  like  His  own. 


Ch.  V]        A   SPIRITUAL  OUTLOOK  163 

Here  in  Him  the  love-principle  which  was 
heralded  all  through  the  long,  slow  process 
has  come  into  full  sight  and  into  full 
operation  as  the  way  of  life.  He  shows 
us  the  meaning  and  possibility  of  genuine 
spiritual  life.  He  makes  us  sure  that  His 
kind  of  life  is  divine,  and  that  in  His 
face  we  are  seeing  the  heart  and  mind 
and  will  of  God.  Here  at  least  is  one 
place  in  our  mysterious  world  where  love 
breaks  through  —  the  love  that  will  not 
let  go,  the  love  that  suffers  long  and  is 
kind.  He  makes  the  eternal  Father's 
love  visible  and  vocal  in  a  life  near  enough 
to  our  own  to  move  us  with  its  appeal 
and  enough  beyond  us  to  be  forever  our 
spiritual  goal.  We  have  here  revealed  a 
divine-human  life  which  we  can  even  now 
in  some  measure  live  and  in  which  we  can 
find  our  peace  and  joy,  and  through  which 
we  can  so  enter  into  relation  with  God  that 
life  becomes  a  radiant  thing,  as  it  was  with 
Him,  and  death  becomes,  as  with  Him,  a 
way  of  going  to  the  Father. 


CHAPTER  VI 

WHAT  DOES  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 
TELL  US  ABOUT  GOD 

"  A  noiseless,  patient  spider, 

I  mark'd,  where,  on  a  little  promontory,  it  stood, 

isolated ; 
Mark'd  how,  to  explore  the  vacant,  vast  surrounding. 
It  launched  forth  filament,  filament,  filament,  out  of 

itself; 
Ever  unreeling  them  —  ever  tirelessly  speeding  them. 

"  And  you,  O  my  Soul,  where  you  stand. 
Surrounded,   surrounded,   in   measureless   oceans  of 

space. 
Ceaselessly   musing,  venturing,   throwing,  —  seeking 

the  spheres,  to  connect  them  ; 
Till  the  bridge  you  will  need,  be  form'd  —  till  the 

ductile  anchor  hold ; 
Till  the  gossamer  thread  you  fling,  catch  somewhere, 

O  my  soul."  —Walt  Whitman. 

There   are   many   forms   of  experience 
which  in  the  primary,  unanalyzed,  unre- 
flective    stage    appear    to    bring    us    into 
164 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  165 

immediate  contact  with  self-transcending 
reality.  We  seem  to  be  nearer  the  heart 
of  things,  more  imbedded  in  life  and  in 
reality  itself  when  consciousness  Is  fused 
and  unified  In  an  undifferentiated  whole  of 
experience  than  in  the  later  stage  of  re- 
flection and  description.  This  later  stage 
necessarily  Involves  reduction  because  it 
involves  abstraction.  We  cannot  bring 
any  object  or  any  experience  to  exact 
description  without  stripping  it  of  its 
life  and  Its  mystery  and  without  reducing 
it  to  the  abstract  qualities  which  are  un- 
varying and  repeatable. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  our  ex- 
periences of  beauty,  for  instance,  have  a 
physical  and  descrlbable  aspect.  The  sun- 
set which  thrills  us  Is  for  descriptive  pur- 
poses an  aggregation  of  minute  water- 
drops  which  set  ether  waves  vibrating  at 
different  velocities,  and,  as  a  result,  we 
receive  certain  nerve  shocks  that  are 
pleasurable.  These  nerve  shocks  modify 
brain  cells  and  affect  arterial  and  visceral 
vibrations,  all  of  which  might  conceivably 


i66  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

be  accurately  described.  But  no  complete 
account  of  these  minute  cloud  particles, 
or  of  these  ether  vibrations ;  no  catalogue 
of  these  nerve  shocks,  cell  changes,  or 
arterial  throbs  can  catch  or  present  to  us 
what  we  get  in  the  naive  and  palpitating 
experience  of  beauty  itself.  Something 
there  in  the  field  of  perception  has  sud- 
denly fused  our  consciousness  into  an 
undifferentiated  whole  in  which  sensuous 
elements,  intellectual  and  ideal  elements, 
emotional  and  conative  elements  are 
indissolubly  merged  into  a  vital  system 
which  baffles  all  analysis.  Something  got 
through  perception  puts  all  the  powers  of 
the  inner  self  into  play  and  into  harmony, 
overcomes  all  dualisms  of  self  and  other, 
annuls  all  contradictions  that  may  later 
be  discovered,  lifts  the  mind  to  the  appre- 
hension of  objects  of  a  higher  order  than 
that  of  sense,  and  liberates  and  vitalizes 
the  soul  with  a  consciousness  of  possession 
and  joy  and  freedom. 

The  flower  of  the  botanist  is  an  aggrega- 
tion  of   ovary,    calyx,    petals,   pistil,  and 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  167 

pollen  —  a  thing  which  can  be  exactly 
analyzed  and  described.  The  poet's 
flower,  on  the  other  hand,  is  never  a 
flower  which  could  be  pressed  in  a  book 
or  dried  in  an  herbarium.  It  is  a  tiny 
finite  object  which  suddenly  opens  a 
glimpse  into  a  world  which  mere  sense- 
eyes  never  see.  It  gives  "thoughts  that 
do  lie  too  deep  for  tears."  It  is  something 
so  bound  in  with  the  whole  of  things  that 
if  one  understood  it  altogether,  he  would 
know  "what  God  and  man  is." 

These  experiences,  even  if  they  do  not 
prove  that  there  is  a  world  of  a  higher 
order  than  that  of  mechanism  and  causal 
systems,  at  least  bring  the  recipient 
moments  of  relief  when  he  no  longer 
cares  for  proof  and  they  enable  him  to 
feel  that  he  has  authentic  tidings  of  a 
world  which  is  as  it  ought  to  be. 

Our  world  of  "inner  experience"  can  in 
a  similar  way  be  dealt  with  by  either  one 
of  these  two  characteristically  different 
methods  of  approach.  We  can  say,  if  we 
wish  to  do  so,  as  Professor  Leuba  does  in 


i68  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

his  Psychology  of  Religion,  that  "inner 
experience  belongs  entirely  to  psychology," 
"the  conscious  life  belongs  entirely  to 
science,"^  "we  must  deal  with  inner 
experience  according  to  the  best  scientific 
methods ;"  ^  or  we  can  seize  by  an  interior 
integral  insight  the  rich  concrete  meaning 
and  significance  of  the  unanalyzed  whole 
of  consciousness,  as  it  lives  and  moves  in 
us. 

Psychology,  like  all  sciences,  proceeds 
by  analysis  and  limitation.  It  breaks  up 
the  integral  whole  of  inner  experience. 
It  strips  away  all  mystery,  all  that  is 
private  and  unique,  and  it  selects  for 
exact  description  the  permanent  and  re- 
peatable  aspects,  and  ends  with  a  con- 
sciousness which  consists  of  "mind-states," 
or  describable  "contents."  Everything 
that  will  not  reduce  to  this  scientific 
"form"  is  ousted  from  the  lists  as  negli- 
gible. All  independent  variables,  all  as- 
pects of  "meaning,"  all  will-attitudes,  the 

1  Leuba's  Psychology  of  Religion,  p.  212. 
^  Ibid.,  p.  277. 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  169 

unique  feature  of  personal  ideals,  the 
integral  consciousness  of  self-identity,  the 
inherent  tendency  to  transcend  the 
"given"  —  all  these  features  are  either 
ignored  or  explained  in  terms  of  sub- 
stitutes. Psychology  confines  itself,  and 
must  confine  itself,  to  an  empirical  and 
describable  order  of  facts.  It  could  no 
more  discover  a  transcendent  world-order 
than  could  geology  or  astronomy.  Its 
field  is  phenomena  and  the  "man"  it 
reports  upon  is  "a  naturalistic  man,"  as 
completely  describable  as  the  sunset  cloud 
or  the  botanist's  flower. 

What  I  insist  upon,  however,  is  that 
this  "described,  naturalistic  man"  is  not 
a  real  existing,  living,  acting  man  possessed 
of  interior  experience.  He  is  a  constructed 
man.  No  addition  of  described  "mind- 
states,"  no  summation  of  "mind-contents" 
would  ever  give  consciousness  in  its  inner 
living  wholeness.  The  reality  whose  pres- 
ence makes  all  the  difference  may  be 
named  "fringe,"  or  "connecting  prin- 
ciple," or  "synthetic  unity"  or  anything 


I70  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

you  please  —  "but  oh!  the  difference  to 
me!"  The  "psychic  elements"  of  the 
psychologist  are  never  really  parts.  Every 
psychical  state  is  in  reality  what  it  is  be- 
cause it  belongs  to  a  person,  is  flooded  with 
unique  life,  and  is  imbedded  in  a  peculiar 
whole  of  personality.  Forever  psychology 
by  its  method  of  analysis  misses,  and  must 
miss,  the  central  core  of  the  reality.  It 
can  analyze,  reduce,  and  describe  the  ab- 
stract, universal,  and  repeatable  aspects, 
but  it  cannot  catch  the  thing  itself  any 
more  than  a  cinematograph  can. 

Here  in  the  inner  life,  if  anywhere,  we 
are  justified  in  seizing  and  valuing  the 
unified  and  undifferentiated  whole  of  ex- 
perience in  its  central  meaning.  If  this 
primary  experience  of  integral  wholeness 
and  unity  of  self  be  treated  as  an  illusion, 
to  what  other  pillar  and  ground  of  truth 
can  we  fasten  .^  The  object  of  beauty 
always  reveals  to  us  something  which 
must  be  comprehended  as  a  totality 
greater  than  the  sum  of  its  parts.  The 
thing  of  beauty  takes  us  beyond  the  range 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  171 

of  the  method  of  description.  So,  too,  in 
the  case  of  our  richest,  most  intense,  and 
unified  moments  of  inner  consciousness, 
we  cannot  get  an  adequate  account  by  the 
method  of  analysis.  We  must  supplement 
science  by  the  best  testimony  we  can  get 
of  the  worth  and  meaning  and  implica- 
tions of  interior  insight.  We  must  get, 
where  possible,  appreciative  accounts  of  the 
undifferentiated  and  unreduced  experience 
and  then  we  can  raise  the  question  as  to 
what  is  rationally  involved  in  such  per- 
sonal experiences. 

As  mystical  experience  supplies  us  with 
moments  of  the  highest  integral  unity,  the 
richest  wholes  of  consciousness,  I  shall 
deal  mainly  with  that  type,  and  I  shall 
endeavor  to  see  whether  it  gives  any  proof 
of  a  trans-subjective  reality.  There  can 
be  no  doubt  that  this  type  of  experience 
brings  the  recipient  spiritual  holidays  from 
strain  and  stress,  that  it  gives  life  an 
optimistic  tone,  and  leaves  behind  a  fresh 
supply  of  energy  to  live  by,  but  can  it 
carry  us  any  farther  ?     Does  it  supply  us 


172  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

with  a  ladder  or  a  bridge  by  which  we  can 
get  "yonder"  ? 

Josiah  Royce  in  The  World  and  the 
Individual  says  that  the  mystic  "gets 
his  reality  not  by  thinking,  but  by  con- 
sulting the  data  of  experience.  He  is 
trying  very  skillfully  to  be  a  pure  empiri- 
cist." "Indeed,"  he  adds,  "I  should  main- 
tain that  the  mystics  are  the  only 
thoroughgoing  empiricists  in  the  history 
of  philosophy."^  "Finite  as  we  are," 
Royce  says  elsewhere  in  the  same  book, 
"lost  though  we  may  seem  to  be  in  the 
woods  or  in  the  wide  air's  wilderness,  in 
the  world  of  time  and  chance,  we  have 
still,  like  the  strayed  animals  or  like  the 
migrating  birds,  our  homing  instinct."  ^ 

Now  the  mystics  in  all  ages  have  in- 
sisted that,  whether  the  process  be  named 
"instinct,"  or  "intuition,"  or  "inner 
sense,"  or  "uprushes,"  the  spirit  of  man 
is  capable  of  immediate  experience  of  God. 
There    is    something    in    man,    "a    soul- 


1  The  World  and  the  Individual^  Vol.  I,  p.  8i. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  i8i. 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  173 

center"  or  "an  apex  of  soul,"  which  di- 
rectly apprehends  God.  It  is  an  immense 
claim,  but  those  who  have  the  experience 
are  as  sure  that  they  have  found  a  wider 
world  of  life  as  is  the  person  who  thrills 
with  the  appreciation  of  beauty. 

Cases  of  the  experience  are  so  well 
known  to  us  all  to-day  that  I  shall  quote 
only  a  very  few  accounts.  It  looks  to  me 
as  though  some  of  this  direct  and  imme- 
diate experience  underlay  the  entire  fabric 
of  St.  Paul's  transforming  and  dynamic  re- 
ligious life.  "It  pleased  God  to  reveal 
His  Son  in  me."  "It  is  no  longer  I  that 
live  but  Christ  liveth  in  me."  "God 
sent  forth  the  Spirit  of  His  Son  into  our 
hearts,  crying  Ahha^  Father."  "God  who 
commanded  the  light  to  shine  out  of  dark- 
ness hath  shined  in  our  hearts."  The  entire 
autobiographical  story,  wherever  it  comes 
into  light,  lets  us  see  a  man  who  is  able  to 
face  mmense  tasks  and  to  die  daily  because 
he  feels  in  some  real  way  that  his  life  has 
become  "a  habitation  of  God  through  the 
Spirit"  and  that  he  is  being  "filled  to  all 


174  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

fullness  with  God."  St.  Augustine  in  the 
same  way  makes  the  reader  of  the  Confes- 
sions feel  that  the  most  wonderful  thing 
about  this  strange  African  who  was  for  a 
thousand  years  to  be  the  Atlas,  on  whose 
shoulders  the  Church  rested,  was  his  ex- 
perience of  God.  He  is  speaking  out  of 
experience  when  he  says,  "My  God  is  the 
Life  of  my  life."  "Thou,  O  God,  hast 
made  us  for  Thyself  and  our  hearts  are 
restless  until  they  rest  in  Thee."  "I 
tremble  and  I  burn ;  I  tremble  feeling 
that  I  am  unlike  Him ;  I  burn  feeling 
that  I  am  like  Him."  "I  heard  God  as 
the  heart  heareth."  "We  climbed  in 
inner  thought  and  speech,  and  in  wonder 
of  Thy  works,  until  we  reached  our  own 
minds  and  passed  beyond  them  and 
touched  That  which  is  not  made  but  is 
now  as  it  ever  shall  be,  or  rather  in  It  is 
neither  *hath  been'  nor  *  shall  be'  but  only 
*is' — just  for  an  instant  touched  It  and 
in  one  trembling  glance  arrived  at  That 
which  is." 

Jacob     Boehme's     testimony     is     very 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  175 

familiar,  but  it  is  such  a  good  interior 
account  that  I  must  repeat  it. 

**  While  I  was  in  affliction  and  trouble,  I  elevated 
my  spirit,  and  earnestly  raised  it  up  unto  God,  as 
with  a  great  stress  and  onset,  Ufting  up  my  whole 
heart  and  mind  and  will  and  resolution  to  wrestle 
with  the  love  and  mercy  of  God  and  not  to  give 
over  unless  He  blessed  me  —  then  the  Spirit  did 
break  through.  When  in  my  resolved  zeal  I  made 
such  an  assault,  storm,  and  onset  upon  God,  as  if 
I  had  more  reserves  of  virtue  and  power  ready, 
with  a  resolution  to  hazard  my  life  upon  it,  sud- 
denly my  spirit  did  break  through  the  Gate,  not 
without  the  assistance  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  and  I 
reached  to  the  innermost  Birth  of  the  Deity,  and 
there  I  was  embraced  with  love  as  a  bridegroom 
embraces  his  bride.  My  triumphing  can  be  com- 
pared to  nothing  but  the  experience  in  which  Hfe 
is  generated  in  the  midst  of  death  or  Hke  the  resur- 
rection from  the  dead.  In  this  Light  my  spirit 
suddenly  saw  through  all,  and  in  all  created  things, 
even  in  herbs  and  grass,  I  knew  God  —  who  He  is, 
how  He  is,  and  what  His  will  is."  ^ 

Very  impressive  are  the  less  well-known 
words  of  Isaac  Penington :  "This  is  He, 
this  is  He:    There  is  no  other.     This  is 

1  The  Aurora,  Chap.  XIX,  pp.  10-13. 


176  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

He  whom  I  have  waited  for  and  sought 
after  from  my  childhood.  I  have  met 
with  my  God ;  I  have  met  with  my 
Savior.  I  have  felt  the  healings  drop 
into  my  soul  from  under  His  wings."  ^ 

Edward  Carpenter  has  given  many 
accounts  of  the  transforming  experience 
when  he  felt  himself  united  in  a  living 
junction  with  the  infinite  ''including  Self." 
"The  prince  of  love,"  he  says,  "touched 
the  walls  of  my  hut  with  his  finger  from 
within,  and  passing  through  like  a  great 
fire  delivered  me  with  unspeakable  deliver- 
ance." ^  It  brought  him,  as  he  himself 
says,  "an  absolute  freedom  from  mortality 
^Op.rC  accompanied  by  an  indescribable  calm  and 
ct£.  -dh*f  joy-"  ^  A  nameless  writer  in  the  "  Atlantic 
Monthly"  for  May,  1916,  has  given  a  re- 
vQu<t  jnarkable  description  of  an  experience 
which  is  called  "Twenty  Minutes  of 
Reality."  "  I  only  remember,"  the  writer 
says,  "finding  myself  in  the  very  midst 
of    those    wonderful    moments,    beholding 

1  Isaac  Penington,  Works,  Vol.  I,  p.  xxxvii. 

2  Towards  Democracy,  p.  190. 
^  Ibid.,  p.  513. 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  177 

life  for  the  first  time  in  all  its  young  in- 
toxication of  loveliness  in  its  unspeakable 
joy,  beauty,  and  importance.  I  cannot 
say  what  the  mysterious  change  was  —  I 
saw  no  new  thing,  but  I  saw  all  the  usual 
things  in  a  miraculous  new  light  —  in 
what  I  believe  is  their  true  light.  .  .  . 
Once  out  of  all  the  gray  days  of  my  life  I 
have  looked  into  the  heart  of  reality ;  I 
have  witnessed  the  truth ;  I  have  seen 
life  as  it  really  is  —  ravishingly,  ecstati- 
cally, madly  beautiful,  and  filled  to  over- 
flowing with  a  wild  joy  and  a  value  un- 
speakable." 

Finally,  I  shall  give  a  modern  Russian 
writer's  appreciative  report  of  a  typical 
mystical  experience : 

"There  are  seconds  when  you  suddenly  feel  the 
presence  of  the  eternal  harmony  perfectly  attained. 
It's  something  not  earthly  —  I  don't  mean  in  the 
sense  that  it's  heavenly  —  but  in  that  sense  that 
man  cannot  endure  it  in  his  earthly  aspect.  He 
must  be  physically  changed  or  die.  This  feeling  is 
clear  and  unmistakable;  it's  as  though  you  appre- 
hend all  nature  and  suddenly  say,  *Yes,  that's 
right.*     God,  when  He  created  the  world,  said  at 


178  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

the  end  of  each  day  of  creation,  'Yes,  It's  right, 
it's  good/  It  .  .  .  it's  not  being  deeply  moved, 
but  simply  joy.  You  don't  forgive  anything  be- 
cause there  is  no  more  need  of  forgiveness.  It's 
not  that  you  love  —  oh,  there's  something  in  it 
higher  than  love  —  what's  most  awful  is  that  it's 
terribly  clear  and  such  joy.  In  those  five  seconds 
I  live  through  a  lifetime,  and  I'd  give  my  whole  life 
for  them,  because  they  are  worth  it."  ^ 

It  should  always  be  noted  that  the 
number  of  persons  who  are  subject  to 
mystical  experiences  —  that  is  to  say, 
persons  who  feel  themselves  brought  into 
contact  with  an  environing  Presence  and 
supplied  with  new  energy  to  live  by  —  is 
much  larger  than  we  usually  suppose. 
We  know  only  the  mystics  who  were 
dowered  with  a  literary  gift  and  who  could 
tell  in  impressive  language  what  had  come 
to  them,  but  of  the  multitude  of  those  who 
have  felt  and  seen  and  who  yet  were  un- 
able to  tell  in  words  about  their  experience, 
of  these  we  are  ignorant.  An  undeveloped 
and   uncultivated   form   of  mystical   con- 

*  Dostoievsky's  The  Possessed. 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  179 

sciousness  is  present,  I  think,  in  most 
religious  souls,  and  whenever  it  is  unusually 
awake  and  vivid  the  whole  inner  and  outer 
life  is  intensified  by  such  experiences,  even 
though  there  may  be  little  that  can  be 
put  into  explicit  account  in  language. 
There  are  multitudes  of  men  and  women 
now  living,  often  in  out-of-the-way  places, 
in  remote  hamlets  or  on  isolated  farms, 
who  are  the  salt  of  the  earth  and  the  light 
of  the  world  in  their  communities,  because 
they  have  had  vital  experiences  that  re- 
vealed to  them  realities  which  their  neigh- 
bors missed  and  that  supplied  them  with 
energy  to  live  by  which  the  mere  "church- 
goers" failed  to  find. 

I  am  more  and  more  convinced,  as  I 
pursue  my  studies  on  the  meaning  and 
value  of  mysticism,  with  the  conviction 
that  religion,  i.e.  religion  when  it  is  real, 
alive,  vital,  and  transforming,  is  essen- 
tially and  at  bottom  a  mystical  act,  a 
direct  response  to  an  inner  world  of 
spiritual  reality,  an  implicit  relationship 
between   the   finite   and   infinite,   between 


l8o  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

the  part  and  the  whole.  The  French 
philosopher,  Emile  Boutroux,  has  finely 
called  this  junction  of  finite  and  infinite 
in  us,  by  which  these  mystical  experiences 
are  made  possible,  "the  Beyond  that  is 
within"  —  "the  Beyond,"  as  he  says, 
"with  which  man  comes  in  touch  on  the 
inner  side  of  his  nature." 

Whenever  we  go  back  to  the  funda- 
mental mystical  experience,  to  the  soul's 
first-hand  testimony,  we  come  upon  a 
conviction  that  the  human  spirit  trans- 
cends itself  and  is  environed  by  a  spiritual 
world  with  which  it  holds  commerce  and 
vital  relationship.  The  constructive  mys- 
tics, not  only  of  the  Christian  communions 
but  also  those  of  other  religions,  have  ex- 
plored higher  levels  of  life  than  those  on 
which  men  usually  live,  and  they  have 
given  impressive  demonstration  through 
the  heightened  dynamic  quality  of  their 
lives  and  service  that  they  have  been 
drawing  upon  and  utilizing  reservoirs  of 
vital  energy.  They  have  revealed  a  pecul- 
iar aptitude  for  correspondence  with   the 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF   GOD 


i«i 


Beyond  that  Is  within,  and  they  have  ex- 
hibited a  genius  for  living  by  their  inner 
conviction  of  God,  "of  practicing  God," 
as  Jeremy  Taylor  called  it. 

But  are  we  justified  In  making  such 
large  affirmations  ?  Is  there  anything  in 
the  nature  of  mystical  experience  that 
warrants  us  in  taking  the  leap  from  Inner 
vision  to  existential  reality  ?  Can  we 
legitimately  get  from  a  finite,  subjective 
feeling  to  an  objective  and  infinite  God? 
The  answer  is  of  course  obvious.  There 
is  no  way  to  get  a  bridge  from  finite  to 
infinite,  from  subject  to  object,  from  idea 
to  that  which  the  Idea  means,  from  human 
to  divine,  from  mere  man  to  God,  if  they 
are  isolated,  sundered,  disparate  entities 
to  start  with.  No  mere  finite  experience 
of  a  mere  finite  thing  can  be  anything  but 
fixnite,  and  no  juggling  can  get  out  of  the 
experience  what  is  not  in  it.  If  we  mean 
by  "empirical"  that  which  Is  "given" 
as  explicit  sense-content  of  consciousness, 
then  the  only  empirical  argument  that 
could  be  would  be  the  statement  that  we 


1 82  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

experience  what  we  experience.  We  should 
not  get  beyond  the  consciousness  of  inter- 
jection —  "lo  !"  "voila!" 

In  this  sense  of  the  term,  of  course  no- 
body ever  did  or  ever  could  "experience 
God."  We  are  shut  up  entirely  to  a 
stream  of  inner  states,  a  seriatim  conscious- 
ness, "a  shower  of  shot,"  which  can  give 
us  no  knowledge  at  all,  either,  in  Berkeley's 
words,  of  "the  choir  of  heaven"  or  of 
"the  furniture  of  earth"  or  of  "the 
mighty  frame  of  the  world,"  or  in  fact, 
of  any  permanent  self  within  us. 

Used  in  the  narrow  Humian  sense  there 
are  no  "empirical  arguments"  for  the 
existence  of  God,  but  the  misery  of  it  is 
there  are  no  arguments  for  anything  else 
either !  We  must  therefore  widen  out  the 
meaning  of  the  term  "empirical"  and 
include  in  it  not  only  the  actual  "con- 
tent" of  experience,  but  all  that  is  involved 
and  implicated  in  experience.  We  cannot 
talk  about  any  kind  of  reality  until  we 
interpret  experience  through  its  rational 
implications.     Nobody  ever  perceives   "a 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  183 

black  beetle"  and  knows  it  as  "a  black 
beetle"  without  transcending  "pure  em- 
piricism," i.e.  without  using  categories 
which  are  not  a  product  of  experience. 
All  experience  which  has  any  knowledge- 
import,  or  value,  possesses  within  itself 
self-transcendence,  that  is  to  say,  it  appre- 
hends or  takes  by  storm  some  sort  of  ex- 
ternal or  objective  reality.  Nobody  is 
ever  disturbed  by  the  fallacy  of  subjec- 
tivism until  he  has  become  debauched  by 
metaphysics.  The  fallacy  of  subjectivism 
is  always  the  product  of  the  abstract 
intellect,  i.e.  the  intellect  which  divides 
experience,  and  takes  an  abstract  part  for  a 
whole. 

It  is  further  true  that  all  knowledge- 
experience  possesses  within  itself  iinite- 
transcendence,  i.e.  it  contains  in  itself  a 
principle  of  infinity  and  could  become  ab- 
solutely rationalized  only  in  an  infinite 
whole  of  reality  with  which  the  experience 
is  in  organic  unity.  I  agree  fully  with 
Professor  Hocking  that  "it  is  doubtful 
whether  there  are  any  finite  ideas  at  all." 


1 84  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

The  consciousness  of  the  finite  has  work- 
ing in  it  the  reality  of  the  whole.  The 
finite  can  never  be  considered  as  self- 
existent;  it  can  never  be  real.  There  is 
forever  present  in  the  very  heart  and  na- 
ture of  consciousness  a  trope,  a  nisus,  a 
straining  of  the  fragment  to  link  itself  up 
with  the  self-complete  whole,  and  every 
flash  of  knowledge  and  every  pursuit  of 
the  good  reveals  that  trend.  Something 
of  the  other  is  always  in  the  me  —  and  how- 
ever finite  I  may  be  I  am  always  beyond 
myself,  and  am  conjunct  with  "the  pulse 
beat  of  the  whole  system."  Either  we 
must  give  up  talking  of  knowledge  or  we 
must  affirm  that  knowledge  involves  a 
self-complete  and  self-explanatory  reality 
with  which  our  consciousness  has  connec- 
tion. We  cannot  think  finite  and  con- 
tingent things,  or  aim  at  goodness  however 
fragmentary,  without  rational  appeal  to 
something  infinite  and  necessary.  Hu- 
man experience  cannot  be  rationally  con- 
ceived except  as  a  fragment  of  a  vastly 
more  inclusive  experience,  always  implied 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  185 

within  the  finite  spirit,  unifying  and  bind- 
ing together  into  one  whole  all  that  is 
absolutely  real  and  true.  Whether  we  are 
dealing  with  the  so-called  mystical  experi- 
ence or  any  other  kind  of  experience  we  are 
bound  to  postulate,  or  take  for  granted, 
whatever  is  rationally  implicated  in  the 
very  nature  of  the  experience  on  our  hands. 
No  type  of  consciousness  carries  the 
implication  of  self-transcendence,  or  finite- 
transcendence,  more  coercively  than  does 
genuine  mystical  experience.  The  central 
aspect  of  it  is  the  fusion  of  the  self  into  a 
larger  undiiferentlated  whole.  It  is  thus 
much  more  the  type  of  aesthetic  experience 
than  it  is  the  type  of  knowledge-experience. 
In  both  types  —  the  aesthetic  and  the 
mystical  —  consciousness  is  fused  into 
union  with  its  object,  that  is  to  say,  the 
usual  dualistic  character  of  consciousness 
is  transcended,  though  of  course  not 
wholly  obliterated.  A  new  level  of  con- 
sciousness is  gained  in  which  the  division 
of  self  and  other  is  minimal.  But  it  is 
by  no  means,  in  either  case,  an  empty  or  a 


1 86  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

negative  state.  The  impression  which  so 
many  mystics  have  given  of  negation  or 
passivity  springs,  as  Von  Hiigel  declares, 
from  an  unusually  large  amount  of  actu- 
alized energy,  an  energy  which  is  now 
penetrating  and  finding  expression  by 
every  pore  and  fiber  of  the  soul.  The 
whole  moral  and  spiritual  creature  ex- 
pands and  rests,  yes  :  but  this  very  rest  is 
produced  by  action  "unperceived  because 
so  fleet,"  "so  near,  so  all  fulfilling;  or 
rather  by  a  tissue  of  single  acts,  mental, 
emotional,  volitional,  so  finely  interwoven, 
so  exceptionally  stimulative  and  expressive 
of  the  soul's  deepest  aspirations,  that  these 
acts  are  not  perceived  as  single  acts,  in- 
deed that  their  very  collective  presence  is 
apt  to  remain  unnoticed  by  the  soul  it- 
self." ^  Wordsworth's  account  passes  al- 
most unconsciously  from  appreciation  of 
beauty  into  joyous  apprehension  of  God 
and  it  is  a  wonderful  self-revelation  of 
fused  consciousness  which  is  positively 
affirmative. 

1  The  Mystical  Element,  Vol.  II,  p.  132. 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  187 

"Sensation,  soul  and  form 
All  melted  into  him ;   they  swallowed  up 
His  animal  being ;   in  them  did  he  live, 
And  by  them  did  he  live ;   they  were  his  life. 
In  such  access  of  mind,  in  such  high  hours 
Of  visitation  from  the  living  God, 
Thought  was  not;   in  enjoyment  it  expired. 
No  thanks  he  breathed,  he  proffered  no  request; 
Rapt  into  still  communion  that  transcends 
The  imperfect  offices  of  prayer  and  praise, 
His  mind  was  a  thanksgiving  to  the  power 
That  made  him ;   it  was  blessedness  and  love.'* 

Tennyson  has  given  many  accounts  both 
in  prose  and  poetry  of  similar  affirma- 
tion experiences,  sometimes  initiated  from 
within  and  sometimes  from  without.  This 
account  from  the  Memoirs  is  a  good  speci- 
men :  "I  have  frequently  had  a  kind  of 
waking  trance  —  this  for  the  lack  of  a 
better  word  —  quite  up  from  my  boyhood, 
when  I  have  been  all  alone.  This  has 
come  upon  me  through  repeating  my  own 
name  to  myself  silently,  till  all  at  once, 
as  it  were  out  of  the  intensity  of  the  con- 
sciousness of  individuality,  individuality 
itself  seemed   to  dissolve   and   fade   away 


1 88  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

into  boundless  being,  and  this  not  a  con- 
fused state  but  the  clearest,  the  surest  of 
the  surest,  utterly  beyond  words  —  where 
death  was  almost  laughable  impossibility 
—  the  loss  of  personality  (if  so  it  were) 
seeming  no  extinction,  but  the  only  true 
life." 

Like  the  aesthetic  experience,  again,  the 
mystical  experience  brings  an  extraordi- 
nary integration,  or  unifying,  of  the  self,  a 
flooding  of  the  entire  being  with  joy  and 
an  expansion  which,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
highest  aesthetic  experiences,  takes  the 
soul  out  into  a  world  which  "never  was 
on  sea  or  land,"  and  which,  nevertheless,  for 
the  moment  seems  the  only  world. 

Balfour  has  finely  pointed  out  in  his 
Theism  and  Humanism,  that  this  expan- 
sion and  joy  and  infinite  aspect  which 
are  inherent  in  the  aesthetic  values  can- 
not be  rationally  explained  except  on 
the  supposition  that  these  values  are  in 
part  dependent  upon  a  spiritual  concep- 
tion of  the  world  —  the  experience  must 
have  a  pedigree  adequate  to  account  for 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  189 

its  greatness.  We  cannot  begin  with  an 
experience  which  gives  an  absolutely  new 
dimension  of  life  and  a  new  world  of  joy, 
and  then  end  in  our  explanation  with  a 
phenomenal  play  of  cosmic  atoms  —  "full 
of  sound  and  fury,  signifying  nothing." 

The  same  thing  is  true  with  our  mystical 
experience.  We  cannot,  of  course,  say  off- 
hand that  here  we  experience  God  as  one 
experiences  an  object  of  sense,  or  that  we 
have  at  last  found  an  infallible  and  in- 
dubitable evidence  of  the  infinite  God. 
My  only  contention  is  that  here  is  a  form 
of  experience  which  implies  one  of  two 
things.  Either  there  is  far  greater  depth 
and  complexity  to  the  inmost  nature  of 
personal  self-consciousness  than  we  usually 
take  into  account,  that  is,  we  ourselves  are 
bottomless  and  inwardly  exhaustless  in 
range  and  scope;  or  the  fragmentary 
thing  we  call  our  self  is  continuous  in- 
wardly with  a  wider  spiritual  world  with 
which  we  have  some  sort  of  contact- 
relationship  and  from  which  vitalizing 
energy  comes  in  to  us.     It  is  too  soon  to 


190  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

decide  between  these  two  alternatives. 
We  are  only  at  the  very  beginning  of  the 
study  of  the  submerged  life  within  our- 
selves, and  we  must  know  vastly  more 
about  it  than  we  now  know  before  we  can 
draw  the  boundaries  of  the  soul  or  declare 
with  certainty  what  comes  from  its  own 
deeps  and  what  comes  from  beyond  its 
farthest  margins.  The  studies  of  Bergson 
and  still  more  emphatically  the  studies  of 
Dr.  William  McDougall  in  Body  and 
Mind  show  very  conclusively  that  the  con- 
sciousness of  meaning^  the  higher  forms  of 
memory,  the  richer  and  more  subtle  emo- 
tional experiences  and  the  more  significant 
facts  of  attention,  conation,  and  will  cannot 
be  explained  in  terms  of  cerebral  activities 
or  by  any  kind  of  mechanical  causation.^ 

To  arrive  at  any  explanation  of  the 
most  central  activities  of  personal  con- 
sciousness we  must  assume  that  conscious- 
ness is  a  reality  existing  in  its  own  sphere 
and  vastly  transcending  the  physical  mech- 
anism which  it  uses.      If    this    is    a   fact 

1  This  point  has  been  discussed  in  the  previous  chapter. 


Ch.  VI]        EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  191 

—  and  McDougall's  argument  is  the  work 
of  one  of  the  most  careful  and  scientifically 
trained  of  modern  psychologists  —  then 
there  is  no  reason  why  what  we  call  the 
"soul"  might  not  on  occasions  receive 
incomes  of  life  and  spiritual  energy  from 
the  infinite  source  of  consciousness.  I 
can  only  say  that  the  mystic  in  his  highest 
moments  feels  himself  to  be  and  believes 
himself  to  be  in  vital  fellowship  with 
Another  than  himself  —  and  what  is  more, 
some  power  to  live  by  does  come  in  from 
somewhere.  Mystical  experiences  in  a 
large  number  of  instances  not  only  per- 
manently integrate  the  self  but  also  bring 
an  added  and  heightened  moral  and  spirit- 
ual quality  and  a  greatly  increased  dy- 
namic effect. 

We  are  still  in  the  stage  of  mystery  in 
dealing  with  the  causes  of  variations  and 
mutations  in  the  biological  order.  Some- 
thing surprising  and  novel,  something 
that  was  not  there  before,  something  in- 
calculable and  unpredictable  suddenly  ap- 
pears and  a  little  living  creature  arrives 


192  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

equipped  with  a  trait  which  no  ancestor 
had  and  by  means  of  which  he  can  endure 
better,  can  see  farther  or  run  faster,  can 
survive  longer,  and  is,  in  fact,  on  a  higher 
life-level.  We  do  not  know  how  the  little 
midget  did  it.  But  some  elan  vital  may- 
have  burst  in  from  an  invisible  and  in- 
tangible environment,  more  real  even  than 
the  environment  we  see.  The  universe,  as 
Professor  Shaler  once  said,  seems  to  be  "a 
realm  of  unending  and  infinitely  varied 
originations."  So,  too,  these  flushes  of 
splendor  which  break  through  the  "Soul's 
east  window  of  divine  surprise"  may  come 
from  a  perfectly  real  spiritual  environment 
without  which  a  finite  spirit  could  not  be  at 
all  or  live  at  all.  I  do  not  know.  Our  frag- 
mentary experiences  cannot  enable  us  to 
furnish  irrefragible  proof.  It  only  looks  as 
though  God  were  within  reach  and  as  though 
at  moments  we  were  at  home  with  Him. 

Gilbert  Murray's  cautious  conclusion  in 
his  fine  essay  on  Stoicism  is  a  good  word 
with  which  to  close  this  chapter. 

"We  seem  to  find,"  he  says,  "not  only 


Ch.  VI]         EXPERIENCE  OF  GOD  193 

in  all  religions,  but  in  practically  all 
philosophies,  some  belief  that  man  is  not 
quite  alone  in  the  universe,  but  is  met  in 
his  endeavours  towards  the  good  by  some 
external  help  or  sympathy.  ...  It  is 
important  to  realize  that  the  so-called 
belief  is  not  really  an  intellectual  judgment 
so  much  as  a  craving  of  the  whole  nature 
[in  us].  ...  It  is  only  of  very  late  years 
that  psychologists  have  begun  to  realize  the 
enormous  dominion  of  those  forces  in  man 
of  which  he  is  normally  unconscious.  We 
cannot  escape  as  easily  as  these  brave  men 
[the  Stoics]  dreamed  from  the  grip  of  the 
blind  powers  beneath  the  threshold.  In- 
deed, as  I  see  philosophy  after  philosophy 
falling  into  this  unproven  belief  in  the 
Friend  behind  phenomena,  as  I  find  that  I 
myself  cannot,  except  for  a  moment  and  by 
an  effort,  refrain  from  making  the  same  as- 
sumption, it  seems  to  me  that  perhaps 
here,  too,  we  are  under  the  spell  of  a  very 
old  ineradicable  instinct.  We  are  gre- 
garious animals ;  our  ancestors  have  been 
such  for  countless  ages.     We  cannot  help 


194  THE  INNER  LIFE  [Ch.  VI 

looking  out  on  the  world  as  gregarious 
animals  do ;  we  see  it  in  terms  of  humanity 
and  of  fellowship.  Students  of  animals 
under  domestication  have  shown  us  how 
the  habits  of  a  gregarious  creature,  taken 
away  from  his  kind,  are  shaped  in  a 
thousand  details  by  reference  to  the  lost 
pack  which  is  no  longer  there  —  the  pack 
which  a  dog  tries  to  smell  his  way  back  to 
all  the  time  he  is  out  walking,  the  pack  he 
calls  to  for  help  when  danger  threatens. 
It  is  a  strange  and  touching  thing,  this 
eternal  hunger  of  the  gregarious  animal 
for  the  herd  of  friends  who  are  not  there. 
And  it  may  be,  it  may  very  possibly  be, 
that,  in  the  matter  of  this  Friend  behind 
phenomena,  our  own  yearning  and  our  own 
almost  ineradicable  instinctive  conviction, 
since  they  are  certainly  not  founded  on 
either  reason  or  observation,  are  in  origin 
the  groping  of  a  lonely-souled  gregarious 
animal  to  find  its  herd  or  its  herd-leader 
in  the  great  spaces  between  the  stars. 

"At  any  rate,  it  is  a  belief  very  difficult 
to  get  rid  of." 

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